By DAMIEN CAVE

KEY LARGO, Florida - When rigs first started drilling for oil off Louisiana’s coast in the 1940s, Floridians, with their resorts and talcum-white beaches, said, No thanks; we’ll stick with tourism.

Now the spreading BP oil spill has reached the northwest coast, known as the Panhandle, and if it rides currents to the renowned reefs and fishing holes on both Florida coasts, the Sunshine State could resemble a museum: Look, but don’t touch.

All because other states decided to rely on oil and gas, angry Floridians say; all because, in the water, there are no borders - only currents that can carry catastrophes hundreds of kilometers.

“There’s nothing we can do,” said Mike McLaughlin, 42, while stretching tanned shark skin on a dock here in the Keys. “We’re just sitting here, waiting for it all to disappear.”

Many Floridians, of course, say they are heartbroken for Louisiana, and they still reserve their most caustic criticism for BP and government regulators.

But with oil gushing from a well off Louisiana, Florida has grown angrier at its oil-friendly neighbors. Governor Charlie Crist said in a June interview that “there’s a certain level of frustration” with the fact that Florida gets little if any financial benefit from offshore drilling, even though it shares the environmental risks.

The divide between the two states is economic as well as cultural: oil and gas contribute about $65 billion a year to the Louisiana economy, according to the state’s oil and gas association, while in Florida, tourism accounts for about $60 billion. The difference, Floridians note, is that a crowded bar in Miami has no impact on New Orleans, Louisiana. Oil spills are a different story.

Sean Snaith, an economist at the University of Central Florida, completed a study showing that Florida’s Gulf Coast could lose 195,000 jobs and $11 billion this year if the spill cuts tourism in half. With oil drilling - as with Wall Street ? “there will be significant rethinking about who benefits and who bears the cost,” Mr. Snaith said.

Florida has a lot to lose, even beyond tourism and fishing. Housing has become increasingly concentrated along the state’s 13,576 kilometers of shoreline. With property values already down by a third in many areas and unemployment around 12 percent, the state could see its economy darkened for a decade by the spill.

Also vulnerable is the world’s thirdlargest reef system, which sits in the likely path of the loop current that, according to oceanographers, has already sent small blots of oil around Florida’s tip.

Residents worry about losing not just their livelihood, but also their way of life.

Boat-dwellers like Paul Peterson, 57, has been fighting Stage 4 lymphoma for years. “It’s a hard fight,” he said. “And this place is so beautiful it would be a sin.”

Charter boat captains and diving instructors are also struggling. In previous years, they would usually have had bookings for much of the summer by now. But Skip Bradeen, 67, said he hadn’t seen it this bad in 40 years.

What really worries most fishermen and environmental scientists are the long-term consequences if oil is carried around Florida’s coast, with plumes underwater and slicks onshore.

“It’s untold billions of babies of fish and lobsters and crabs,” said Douglas N. Rader, chief ocean scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group. “A wide array of seafood are transferred through the superhighway of the loop current and are depending on the habitats affected by the oil.”

Gary Sands, a third-generation fisherman, took a break from his lobster traps to explain what that means.

He pointed to a pair of blond teenagers, sons of a fellow fisherman. “I’m 68, but these boys, they’ve got 30 years,” he said. “If it doesn’t come back for these boys, what’s going to happen?”

Albert Pflueger, 50, another fisherman, pondered the question. “The whole Keys makes its living on the water,” he said. “If there is no water, there is no Keys.”