Gulf oil spill: a muted 'hurrah' across the US as oil stops gushing

"We're doing a little bit of celebrating, but not too much," oysterman Wilbert Collins of Golden Meadow, La., told the Houston Chronicle. "I think things are going to get better and better."

Last month, 18 percent of Americans said the most important problem facing the nation was "natural disaster response/relief." That figure dropped to 7 percent in July, according to a Gallup poll.

And since June, the share of Americans who say the Gulf oil spill is a major disaster declined from 73 to 68 percent, according to a Washington Post poll. That doesn't mean Americans don't care about the mess in the Gulf but, rather, that most identify economic issues as their top concerns.

"I'm sitting here in Madison, [Wis.,] there are no beaches nearby, and so I'm really driven by empathy of people on the Gulf Coast, not from any personal consequence that I can see," says Charles Franklin, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin. "The spill has had to compete with something that's far more fundamentally important to people: the economy."

Yet the oil spill has affected many people far from the Gulf, whether beach condo owners in Atlanta or fertilizer producers in the upper Midwest.

"The disaster’s economic fallout has had a sneaky domino effect, touching the lives of everyone from the French Quarter shuckers who turn oyster-opening into theater to the Minnesota businessman who grinds the shells for chicken-feed supplement," writes The New York Times' Dan Barry. "Some victims were unaware that they were even tiles in the game, so removed were they from the damaged waters."

It's possible that the ever-accessible BP "spill cam" and the constant Internet and TV coverage of the spill helped to raise the stakes and spur attempts to solve the problem of the leaking well. But it's also possible that the saturation coverage might have inured some Americans to the Gulf crisis.

The news media's close attention to a story that didn't change much from day to day contributed to a sense of ennui about the spill, says Ace Lundon, the Arizona-based host of the Internet radio show "Lundon Calling."

"It's like with the immigration issue here in Arizona. Pepole don’t want to hear anything more about it," says Mr. Lundon. "The news labors itself on it. OK, we want to know if the tar balls have been picked up, but we don't want you out there every day inspecting them."

Related:

• Gulf oil spill: As gusher stops, response playbook is being rewritten
• BP oil spill: 'Mystery plumber' may be brains behind containment cap
• Six lessons from the BP oil spill

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