The fishing industry is one of the most heavily impacted by oil spills. After the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf Coast, much of the fish and seafood in the area failed to recover. The Louisiana Department of Wildlife & Fisheries said the seafood harvest was still 50% lower than pre-spill levels even 10 years after the cleanup.
In all, the BP oil spill cut somewhere between $94.7 million and $1.6 million off the valuation of the commercial fishing industry in the Gulf of Mexico, and cost the economy there as many as 9,000 jobs in the first eight months, according to a 2020 study by the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.