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From Dauphin Island Sea Lab, off Alabama's coast, lights from natural gas operations shimmer in the night sky. Dr. John Dindo, the lab's interim director, has watched them twinkle for years. The state's coast, he said, is doing fine.

"The sand I'm sitting here and looking at from my office is just as white as yours," Dindo said.

In Texas, oil is part of the culture on land and water. Drilling infrastructure off the state's coast has become as much a part of the horizon as sunrise and sunset.

David Quijano has been surfing the waves off Galveston for nearly all of his 30 years of life.

"You really wouldn't notice it, really," he said of Texas' offshore drilling. "They put them things ... the closest one is, like, 2 miles out."

Quijana said he can't think of any downsides to the drilling. He's too young to remember the Ixtoc blowout in Mexico. The 1979 accident resulted in 3.5 million barrels of oil being released into the water. Slicks drifted north onto American beaches, with Texas suffering the brunt.

Ed Ownes, an independent advisor on oil spill cleanups, described a chance of having another accident of Ixtoc proportions as "pretty low."

"The technology has changed so much over the years," he said. "The track record for blowouts as a result of drilling is so low, it's almost not even on the scales."

Most oil spills, however, do not originate with drilling operations. Owens said he usually is responding to leaks stemming from the necessary infrastructure.

"It's not the oil rigs that do the leaking," agreed Elbert Sirmons, who tends to accidents with Garner Environmental Services in Port Arthur, Texas. "It's the ships, barges and pipelines."

If a spill does occur, teams of people such as Owens arrive at the affected site and coordinate cleanup efforts with local officials. He just returned from a cleanup in San Francisco Bay of "a few thousand gallons" that cost $70 million.

Such an accident can have an upside, Owens said. A massive cleanup effort infuses the oil-covered locale with a rush of money.

"These millions of dollars actually go into the infrastructure of the community," he said. "Some people are actually sad to see us go ... not the impact of the oil on themselves, but that a small town has become fairly busy."

Another possible benefit of offshore drilling could be an improved fishing forecasts. Louisiana fishermen, for example, make regular trips out to the state's many oil rigs, where game fish flock to the structures.

"The best recreational fishing in the gulf is off Louisiana," said Bob Jones, executive director of the Southeast Fisheries Association. "(Rigs) really do attract the fish; they're really good."

But an independent study by the Mobile (Ala.) Press-Register in 2002 found sediment around some older rigs off Alabama's coast showed high concentrations of mercury. It's theorized fish flocking to rigs could be affected, but the data is scant.

"It's one of those things no one has really taken on as a research effort," said Dave Krabbenhoft, a scientist with the United States Geological Survey. "The couple of times I tried to initiate studies out there, I wasn't allowed on the platforms."

The author of the Press-Register's article on rig-related mercury, Ben Raines, said the issue primarily pertains to older rigs, where a more mercury-rich drilling lubricant was used years ago. Raines has spent a good bit of time exploring the world of offshore drilling. He now is more interested in jellyfish than mercury.

"The real issue is probably the structures," Raines said, referring to the steel rigs the tentacled globs love. "Jellyfish numbers have been going up ever since they put rigs in the water."

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