BP’s worst nightmare is multiple images of spoiled beaches, dead fish, and black soot. They’ve done everything possible to prevent those images from reaching the public. They’ve dumped millions of gallons of dispersants in the water, some so toxic they were banned in the UK. They’ve sought to keep the oil slick underwater and then denied its existence, even though they expected sub-surface plumes in pre-spill tests.

But despite all their efforts, you cannot hold back a spill of millions of gallons forever. And so…:

A tide of sludgy oil has begun washing into the fringes of Louisiana’s coastal marshes, officials said Tuesday, as BP continued to siphon some of the oil gushing from a damaged well on the gulf floor but remained days away from trying to cap the leak [...]

And hundreds of miles from the Louisiana coast, there was a worrisome discovery: Tar balls, sticky clumps of decayed oil, were found Monday in Key West, Fla. Officials said they were being tested to determine whether they came from the leaking BP well.

But the most ominous news came from south Louisiana, where the Mississippi Delta peters out into the Gulf of Mexico. There, instead of the tar balls that had previously washed ashore from the spill, thick, brown oil was infiltrating the edges of the marshes.

“If I had been standing up, I would have fell to my knees,” said Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish, La., about the moment that he heard the news. Nungesser, whose parish follows the Mississippi out to sea, said the oil had been spotted at places called South Pass and Pass-a-Loutre. “It’s our greatest fear.”

The oil is piercing the wetlands, and the consequences will be devastating for the fisheries around there.

BP, in conjunction with the Coast Guard, remains committed to containing the PR damage from this. They harassed some CBS journalists:

When CBS News tried to reach the beach, covered in oil, a boat of BP contractors with two Coast Guard officers on board told us to turn around under threat of arrest. Coast Guard officials said they are looking into the incident.

But that’s not going to be a durable solution. Especially with oil moving into the loop current, which could take it across the Florida Keys, up the Atlantic and even across the ocean into Europe. While the tar balls washed ashore on the Keys are reportedly not from this oil spill, it’s a matter of days before they could hit it.

BP told the government they could handle a spill 60 times the size of this one. But to do so, they’d have to keep it off the teevee screens. That’s becoming less likely now.