For Erika Olinger, owner of the Cole Pratt Gallery in New Orleans, the atmosphere in the city she has come to love was “eerie” earlier this week, thanks to the oil spill off the Gulf Coast of Louisiana.

She said she and her neighbors were angry about the spill and were concerned about more than its economic and environmental impact—they’re also worried about the impact on their health and on a city and coast that has suffered more than its share of calamity, with the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina looming in August.

And, Olinger predicted Tuesday that the rest of the nation could soon be sharing Louisiana’s suffering, “if the oil does get in the loop current.”

Well, that’s exactly what has happened. That’s a big deal because the current could carry the pollution across the Gulf of Mexico to Florida’s beaches and up the East Coast, imperiling the fishing and tourism industries all along the way. This comes just as tourism and fishing seasons hit their stride with the traditional Memorial Day weekend kickoff.

It’s difficult to predict exactly where the oil will go once it hits the loop current, scientists say.

Plus, for the first time, the brown sludge from the oil spill has been seen coming ashore in Louisiana’s delicate marsh ecosystem, breeding ground for the nation’s second-largest fishing industry.

"This is the heavy oil that everyone's been fearing that is here now," Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal said during a boat tour of his state’s coast. Already, thousands of square miles of the Gulf have been barred to fishing, right at the high season for such activities as shrimping.

The oil started to spill a month ago, when an explosion rocked the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig, killing 11 workers. The rig, which was owned by Transocean and leased by British oil giant BP, sank two days later.

BP had estimated that 210,000 gallons of oil a day were coming from the spill. But now, the oil company acknowledges the amount of oil being released into the Gulf of Mexico is greater than expected, though a spokesman is not saying by how much.

Before this week, most analysts looked at how the economies of Mississippi and Louisiana would be affected by the spill. Now, the impact on Florida is being closely analyzed.

“The state’s high dependence on tourism dollars and jobs is significant, and a gradually worsening disaster associated with any part of Florida’s 1,197 coastline miles could likely have long-term implications even greater than the recent global recession or Hurricane Ivan in 2004,” Moody’s said in a special comment issued Tuesday.

While Louisiana's commercial fishery is endangered, it's sport fishing in Florida that could be hit by the disaster. That's a $1.2 billion industry on its own.

And that’s just in Florida. If the sludge rounds the peninsula and pollutes beaches from Florida to the Carolinas and beyond, the damage could be incalculable, dwarfing the worst oil disaster in U.S. history, the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989.

The worry in Florida is so intense that BP has thrown the state $25 million to promote its beaches, which so far remain oil free. Governor Charlie Crist has already created an oil spill recovery task force.

The task force will be responsible for monitoring BP’s efforts in providing financial relief to those businesses that may suffer losses, coordinating efforts to gather economic-loss data, making sure there’s a marketing plan in place to let people know that Florida is open for business, and developing a website to disseminate information and communicate with businesses and industries.

The task force will have to provide the governor with a written report of its accomplishments every month.

Meanwhile, hopes for stopping the oil from continuing to gush center on a so-called top-kill operation BP will attempt as early as Sunday. The company will inject heavy drilling fluids into the leaking pipe 5,000 feet beneath the surface of the Gulf in an effort to block further leaking.

"Our priority is to stop the well from leaking because that's where the cancer is, and we need to get that stopped," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said.

But it remains to be seen the full impact the hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil already leaked in the past month will have on the Gulf and, perhaps, elsewhere.

This story is based in part on reporting from the South Florida Business Journal.

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Kent Bernhard Jr. is News Editor of Portfolio.com