hey rick. reporter: good morning, martha. rough winds and choppy seas and that means very little cleanup effort going on, no skimmers, no vessels of opportunity to help picking up the oil, the barges serving as barriers are back on shore and some of the containment boom like the boom you see on the beach, some of the boom on the water has been pulled back because of concerns it might break free. but despite the small craft warning that s in effect we did go out on to the waters with the local fishermen and it didn t take long to find the oil. an oily, shiny sheen, two and a quarter miles from grand isle beach, in addition to the rainbow-colored oil on the surface which we can also smell we re seeing little globs of oil floating, little globs that will become tar balls if they hit the beach and are covered with sand. this is threatening, according to our host, his way of life.
very concerned. it is this first major threat grand isle in three weeks, a massive oil slick, a tremendous plume on a course for grand isle and expected to hit in the next 24 to 48 hours, how big is it, you ask? government officials told me the oil slick is 32 miles long, and several miles wide and could be broken up, by chemical disperse ants but it is very, very large and is moving towards the coast, in pretty rapid fashion. it is a large slick which has fingers of oil reaching from the sides of it both at the surface of the water and down below, as well. and, while the coast guard and bp and other agencies have a lot of barriers set up to try to stop the oil from reaching shore there is no guarantee they ll be effective. there is containment boom in the water and along the beaches as well and there are barges being
partially broken up by chemical dispersants and long fingers of oil stretching from the center both above and below the surface. now, bp and other agencies have set up layers of defenses, including miles of containment boom, and a series of barges along the water in the bay to try and keep the oil from reaching shore, they have vac trucks on the barges, huge 18-wheelers with vacuums and suck it up as it approaches. no one knows for sure if it will keep it from the shore and a spokesman i talked to did not sound too optimistic. juliet: rick, we also understand there s some of this oil may have already washed ashore in some spots there, is that right. for the first time ever, a grand isle home owner claimed to have oil in his front yard and we went to examine that front yard earlier today. we went to bret s camper and
meanwhile we re getting new images like this one. look at this tar balls, washing ashore of the once pristine beach, you have seen these pictures before, but new beaches are involved now, panama city, marina in florida, where elizabeth prann is, what is the latest on the cleanup there. reporter: jamie, the tar balls come in all different forms and come unpredictably. almost in waves, which is why the staging area behind me so is important at the panama city marina, hundreds of thousands of feet of containment boom coming from state contractors before they are deployed across the panhandle. but, the marina is also a meeting place for some local under water scientists who say there is going to be damages to marine life we cannot always see. we see devastating pictures of oiled birds and also there are parts of the lower water ponds wher the man made and -oth mamadend nural are a risk, as the oil slick comes ashore it could possibly suck
of it. reporter: and that s why hinton mobilized nine majors at the bay. he had to fight and he was eager to show us why. the bay is home to an s tuary. he has served here his whole life and served as the chief of the fire department. mail is delivered by boat and wildlife dots the landscape. but there is an underlying anxiety. if we can t stop the oil from getting in here, it could be lost for multiple generations. in early may when cnn first visited magnolia springs, hinton had sounded the alarm and was told by some locals he was overreacteding. bp had provided a single line of booms, so hinton drew up a plan to use barges along the containment boom. bp has since provided much more boom, staff and equipment, but hinton says ee relying on his