One of the great fears of Cape Cod was realized this September. A bather was attacked and killed by a Great White Shark.
It was the first shark attack fatality (on a human) in Massachusetts since 1936, when a child was partially devoured off of Mattapoisett. Our previous shark attack fatality, off of Scituate, was from before the Civil War, and the one before that- and the only other shark attack fatality in Massachusetts since the Pilgrims arrived- was before the American Revolution.
Your chances of becoming a shark's dinner are, according to the Daily Mirror, 300000000 to 1. By rate of comparison, 250000000 to 1 is your chance of being killed by a falling coconut.
Sharks swam by thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of swimmers on Cape Cod this summer. They tasted two of them.
All of this means very little to a tourist region. Millions of people will see the headlines touting a shark attack fatality on Cape Cod. Not many of them will bother to look up the frequency of such events. They react viscerally, essentially crossing Cape Cod off of the Let's Go There list.
Cape Cod can't afford that. As Mayor Vaughan once said, "summer towns need summer dollars." If they don't get those dollars, as Quint noted, they'll "be on the welfare all winter."
In a number of surveys, "the beach" is listed as the top reason for coming to Cape Cod. Anywhere between 1.6% (Bourne) and 5.6% (Provincetown) of the workforce is directly related to tourism, while the indirect associations are probably closer to the 90s.
In 2011, which I am reading a summary of, $852 billion was spent on Cape Cod by visitors. Over $200 million of that went to wages. Orleans makes $900k on parking fees alone, while Truro does $300k.
Tourism is the golden goose of Cape Cod, and things would be less kosher here if our goose is cooked.
It remains to be seen if the fatality (I've attended a lecture by Dr. Gregory Skomal, and he refers to shark attacks as "interactions") does damage to Cape Cod's tourist industry. Some damage is inevitable, but is it a crippling blow?
Old Cape Cod has a few things going for her in this situation. The numbers favor us in several ways. This attack, nasty as it was, was the first fatality in 82 years. In about 400 years, we have had 4 fatal interactions. If you ignore the recent upward trend, it would seem that the next attack would be far enough in the future that it happens to someone with a George Jetson lifestyle.
That 1 in 300 million number works in our favor, as well. There are 6 billion people or so on the planet. In the last 60 years, there have been 2785 shark attacks, 439 of which were fatal. Massachusetts has one of those. At about 7 fatalities a year, someone else is going to be killed somewhere, and the odds are that it will be somewhere else.
The Wellfleet attack also happened at the very end of our tourist season, especially the Let's Go Swimming part. We had pretty much already juiced the tourists this year, and the next round is 8-9 months away. Our wound has time to heal.
That also buys us time to work on solutions. It will be tempting for pols to ignore this, and hope that the Wellfleet attack was an anomaly. You'll hear a lot of ideas floated around, some good and some bad.
We really should reverse engineer backwards from a scene where we suffer an attack or two early in the season that crushes Cape Cod tourism, and see where we could have made a difference.
Sharks getting a taste for People Food is only going to be bad for us.
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