Tar Mat Washes Up On Central Fla. Beach, WKMG Channel 6 Orlando, June 30, 2010:
Officials await tests this week to determine whether a pancake-sized tar mat, picked up on Melbourne Beach, came from the BP oil spill…
Florida Today
“Nobody should be touching anything,” [Cindy Leckey, a supervisor for Brevard Environmental Health Services] told Local 6 News partner Florida Today. Dial 211 to report it instead, she said.
Chris Davis, visiting from Tennessee, said he found the tar mat Friday while walking the beach. … “It smells like asphalt.”
Coast Guard officials cut out a 1-inch square segment of the tar for testing, Davis said. The rest he keeps in a jar as a souvenir.
Tourist discovers tar mat on Melbourne Beach, Florida Today, June 30, 2010:
Chris Davis was on the beach near the end of Eau Gallie Causeway with his father Friday night when he spotted a glob of tar in the moonlight.
A June 20 article, It’s no longer ‘if’ in Florida but ‘how much’, reported on another strange occurence, just 20 miles north of Melbourne, FL in Cocoa Beach:
[M]any of these wildlife officers are seeing strange things. Last week, an officer from Cocoa Beach, Fla., filmed a large hammerhead shark less than half a mile from shore — part of a phenomenon that scientists suspect could be marine life pushing closer to the land in order to escape deeper habitats polluted by the Deepwater Horizon oil well leak.
