Two weeks ago, Tewelde Tadesse was waiting for the worst and hoping for the best. The worst arrived.

Tadesse, the owner of the only grocery store in Lafitte, Louisiana, south of New Orleans, said thick, brown oil has invaded the marshes surrounding his town. The customers of his Piggly Wiggly, many of them fishermen, are stranded as the fertile fishing grounds they work at this time of year have been placed off limits—a hammer blow to the nation’s second-largest fishery.

“We’re right in the mouth of it,” Tadesse said. “They can’t fish. They can’t do nothing. Right now, we are really under stress with this oil problem. We just don’t know which way to turn. We’re not thinking of any investment. It’s just been too much.”

In some ways, Tadesse says, the leaking oil is a worse disaster for his community than a hurricane. “In a hurricane you know what you got to do. But this one, it’s not clear cut,” he said. Those marshes now being choked by oil are the fertile breeding ground for a fishing industry that is second only to Alaska in size.

Tadesse and his neighbors are contending with the direct impact of a disaster that began with the April 20 explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, which killed 11 workers. The rig sank two days later, causing an oil gusher at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico 40 miles south of Venice, Louisiana.

Officials are scrambling to clean up the mess, and stop the gusher. The latest effort to shut off the flow of oil, called a top kill, was moved from this weekend to mid-week and will essentially pump sludge, followed by cement into the leaking pipe, in theory clogging the oil flow.

But the spill is being felt far from the Louisiana coast. Countless businesses along the Gulf that rely on tourism or fishing have been affected, many of them in places where no oil has come anywhere near shore yet. The Louisiana commercial fishing industry alone has a $2.3 billion economic impact. The Florida sport-fishing industry, also affected, will take a $1.3 billion hit.

In Destin, on the panhandle of Florida, the powdered-sugar-like beaches have yet to be marred by oil or tar balls, and the water is still a pristine green-blue hue. There’s been no sheen or slick offshore near the low-key family resort, says David Dewberry, a boat captain and the owner of Pelican Adventures, a fishing charter company with three boats.

Yet Dewberry has lost about $100,000 in the last month as vacationers have canceled their trips. He said that within days of the Deepwater disaster, vacation interest “pretty much closed it off like a faucet.” His business usually makes about $1 million a year, most of it in June, July, and August.

“There’s no way we’re going to come out of this without losing those three months this year,” he said. “The damage is done. We’ve been here a month with extremely good fishing, just no tourists to take fishing.”

In the Tampa-St. Petersburg area, which like Destin hasn’t seen any oil yet, it’s not just hotels or restaurants that are feeling the pain. At Alden Beach Resort & Suites on St. Pete Beach, calls started coming in within three days of the blowout, Tony Satterfield, vice president of operations, said. “Every call we receive asks about (the oil spill),” he said. “We say it has not affected us yet.”

But in a way, it has. By mid-May, the 140-suite property had lost 100 room nights and about $10,700 in revenue thanks to cancellations.

And it may be just a matter of time before Florida, along with other states, is affected by the oil itself.

Reports last week showed oil from the blown-out well had entered a current known as the Gulf Loop, which could carry the oil across the Gulf to Florida’s west coast, down to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, the Florida Keys, and even beyond, through the straits of Florida, where it could be picked up by the Gulf Stream and carried up the East Coast.

Communities as far away as South Carolina are keeping an eye on the Gulf. Mark Kruea, spokesman for the city of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, said officials from his community had been briefed by the Coast Guard on the possible direction of the spill. But he said they weren’t worried about the spill yet.

“We’ve been in touch with the Coast Guard. There’s fairly good consensus that we don’t have reason to be alarmed yet,” he said. “We are a long, long way from the Gulf of Mexico.”

With the disaster growing by the day, President Barack Obama has appointed a commission to examine what happened to cause it, and review the companies' and government's reaction to it. The commission will be led by former Florida Senator Bob Graham and former EPA Administrator William K. Reilly.

“I want to know what worked and what didn’t work in our response to the disaster, and where oversight of the oil and gas industry broke down,” Obama said Saturday. “We know, for example, that a cozy relationship between oil and gas companies and agencies that regulate them has long been a source of concern.”

But Stuart Smith of New Orleans, the founding partner of SmithStag, LLC, and a plaintiff’s attorney who is one of several lawyers who have filed lawsuits against the trio of companies seen as responsible for the accident—Transocean, which owned the rig; oil giant BP, which leased and operated it; and Halliburton, which had been doing some cement work around the well 20 hours before the explosion—says his experts believe the ecological disaster could spread along with the economic one.

“It’s our experts’ belief that it has hit the loop current and is simply a matter of time before it hits the Florida Keys and enters the Gulf Stream,” Smith said. The scenario spells disaster even if efforts to plug the well succeed, and a worse catastrophe if they don’t. “If they aren’t able to stop the flow with this top kill operation, then Katie, bar the door.”

“The fishermen are obviously looking at the complete loss of their way of life,” he said. “It’s a very unique culture in the United States, and it’s in danger of extinction from this.”

Margaret Cashill of the Tampa Bay Business Journal contributed to this report.

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Kent Bernhard Jr. is News Editor of Portfolio.com