"We made our living this year. I don't know about next year," said Scott St. Pierre, a shrimp boat captain from Galliano, Louisiana. The well, owned by petroleum giant BP, spewed an estimated 4.9 million barrels (206 million gallons) of crude into the Gulf of Mexico before it was temporarily capped July 15. It was permanently sealed only when BP drilled a separate relief well into the sea floor, intercepting the original well and allowing workers to fill it with cement from below. The disaster began with an April 20 explosion aboard the oil rig Deepwater Horizon, about 40 miles off the coast of Louisiana. The blast claimed the lives of 11 workers aboard the platform, which sank two days later in nearly a mile of water. The rig's blowout preventer, a massive fail-safe device at the seabed, failed to operate after the blast. Efforts to activate it using remote submarines failed. An effort to plug it with heavy drilling fluid and cement failed. A bid to jam it shut by pumping it full of debris also failed. Over the spring and summer, as oil washed up on beaches in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, tourists stayed away from the region's white sands in droves. At one point, federal and state authorities had shut down more than a third of the Gulf to fishing, and a temporary federal ban on deepwater drilling idled oil workers. St. Pierre said he has spent most of the last four months working for BP, which hired his boat and crew to drag absorbent boom around oily waters, and has not yet returned to fishing. In the meantime, he said, fishermen have lost market share to imports, buyers are still leery of eating fish from the region and no one knows what impact the spill will have on next year's catch. "The prices are not good. Consumer confidence is low. You can't sell the shrimp," he said. And Barry Deshamp, a charter boat skipper in Long Beach, Mississippi, said his bookings were down 70 percent over the summer. Many of the people who did g