ST. PETE BEACH, Fla.

IN late April, a week after the BP oil spill began, Keith Overton had an alarming encounter with one of his employees here at the TradeWinds Resort. The guy  an engineer who had worked at the hotel for a dozen years  had just spoken with his mother, who lives in Bosnia, and the conversation went like this:

“Are you going to be fired?” she asked.

“Fired?” the son replied. “Why would I get fired?”

“Because your beach is covered with oil,” she said.

Actually, there wasn’t a drop of oil anywhere in sight. Not then, not in the months that followed and not now. This barrier-island city and snowbird haven is hundreds of miles from the nearest land befouled by the collapse of the Deepwater Horizon platform and the epic gusher it left behind.

“That was the moment I realized how big the problem had become,” recalls Mr. Overton, who runs the resort. “At first we thought, ‘Well, people will know there’s a spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and they won’t think that St. Pete has been affected.’ ”

Not so. After the explosion on April 20, there were some cancellations, but what really wrecked the summer for TradeWinds was the countless number of people who feared that oil was about to hit St. Pete and never called in the first place. By Mr. Overton’s calculations, his profits from April to late October sank by slightly more than $1 million, compared with his average earnings during the same period for the last three years.