Stinking seaweed affecting the whole Caribbean including Belize!

Belizeans.com

All ah we da Belizeans!
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Each morning along Mexico’s iconic Caribbean coast, workers with pitchforks ready themselves for another day of war against seaweed.

They haul it off the beach with plastic bags, tanker trucks and small tractors that rumble back and forth in front of sunbathing tourists. By the next morning, new heaps of seaweed have washed ashore and begun to decay — emitting a stench of rotten eggs — and the war starts anew.



This was not what Aymara Flores had promised her two children when she booked a vacation at a luxury Cancun resort.

“I always tell them Cancun is so beautiful, but it’s not the same now,” said Flores, 37, an executive from the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, who found it impossible to swim without being scratched by prickly clumps of seaweed. “Honestly, it’s awful.”

From the shores of Barbados to Miami Beach, masses of stinking seaweed have been washing ashore, threatening fragile coastal ecosystems and sparking panic in nations that depend on the millions of tourists that flock to the region each year to bask on white sand and bathe in turquoise waves.

Scientists warn that the algae known as sargassum are a grave new threat to the Caribbean — one as potentially life-altering as rising sea levels or destructive hurricanes.
 
Ch 7:

Sargassum Smothering Belizean Beaches


So while these renovated airstrips are a solid look for tourism - one pesky phenomenon that is plaguing the industry is sargassum. This brown, smelly sea weed clutter has inundated the beautiful beaches of Caye Caulker, San Pedro, with Placencia and Hopkins being the most affected. Residents have been doing their best to get rid of the sargassum but it is just too much. Minister of Tourism Heredia says this is the worst it has ever been. Today he discussed how the ministry plans to deal with this problem.
Hon. Manuel Heredia Jr., Minister of Tourism
"We have a task force of DOE, Coastal Zone, Fisheries Department and our own people from the industry to see what will be the short term, middle term and long term for this one because we have seen that rather than minimizing it is increasing. The amount we are getting in the Belizean coast line is much greater than anytime in my 30 years of fishing that I did, I have never seen anything like that. It used to be 3 months now, we can't even say how long it will last. It was predicted by scientists that it will be finalized in the middle of August. We are now in September and rather than diminishing, it is increasing so I had a visit to Placencia and I stopped in at Hopkins too and I am glad about the initiative that the stakeholders and the villagers are taking in Placencia. The second step to that will be that they will be putting these curtains to protect. It will not be to stop it put to protect it before it reaches the beach."

We'll keep following this story.
 
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