Each morning’s tide brings in ribbons of spongy seaweed, brown blotches on the Miami Beach sand that stretch for blocks and repulse many sun seekers and swimmers. On Friday, county crews finally began removing sargassum from the beach, an operation that administrators say has been hampered by daunting hurdles.
That would be the turtles.
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State rules governing construction in the sandy nesting grounds of endangered sea turtles require Miami-Dade to obtain special permits before clean-up crews can bring bulldozers and other heavy equipment onto the beach. As residents along the beach complain that local governments are ignoring their pleas for a war against seaweed, Miami-Dade leaders point to red tape in Tallahassee slowing down their battle plan.
“Every week, we have to justify we’re not killing turtles,” said Miami-Dade Commissioner Eileen Higgins, whose district includes the part of Miami Beach undergoing seaweed cleaning. “And we have full-time staff whose whole job is to make sure we aren’t hurting turtles.”
Friday brought a bureaucratic breakthrough after Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Commission cleared the county’s first multi-week permit allowing Miami-Dade to deploy bulldozers and other heavy clean-up equipment through Labor Day weekend. The blanket permission comes with caveats, including state regulators confirming that baby turtles aren’t being harmed by the seaweed purge.
The change in policy from Florida’s wildlife watchdog agency captures the latest example that South Florida’s messy summer of sargassum is producing a new reality for beach life.
Typically, a seasonal state permit for minor beach cleaning operations is enough to deal with the occasional sargassum build-up on a beach. But with record amounts of seaweed flowing onto Florida’s southeast beaches, tractors pulling mechanical rakes weren’t doing the job.
“Once it gets to be a foot deep, that equipment isn’t as effective,” said Carol Knox, a manager with Fish and Wildlife’s Imperiled Species division, which has been approving one- and two-week permits for Miami-Dade’s beach-cleaning crews. “As the accumulations became bigger, they had a harder time.”
With only about 48 hours left on a short-term permit, Miami-Dade on Friday launched its most aggressive operation yet to tackle miles of sargassum piling up on the main tourism magnet for South Florida. The county is only targeting beaches between jetties and breakwaters where seaweed tends to accumulate in feet-wide pile-ups, and the first stretch is between 26th and 31st streets.
Shortly after 8 a.m., a pair of modified tractors passed each other just west of the surf, grinding up the seaweed, filtering out the sand, and stashing that separated sargassum until it can be loaded into a dumpster for a trip to a county landfill.
Parks estimated hauling away all sargassum along Miami-Dade beaches would cost $45 million a year, but targeting four or five so-called “hot spots” of heavy accumulation runs about $500,000 a month. County crews will continue using heavy equipment to cut up sargassum in other areas and scooping it back into the ocean, in hopes outgoing tides will clean up most of the mess.
“This is a natural occurrence,” Parks director Maria Nardi said at a beachside press conference celebrating the start of the removal operations. “A part of that, I think, is an expectation that we will be living with some of it.”
Residents from nearby condo towers were out there, too, and criticized Miami-Dade for not acting quickly enough as sargassum inundated the beaches outside their homes. “We have to get in our car and drive down to Third Street or Fourth Street to go to the beach,” said Amaryllis Diazlay, who lives in a condo tower off 26th Street.
Neighbor Oscar Vasquez pointed to the brown ribbon of fresh sargassum at the edge of the surf, and explained what happens as it rots in the sun if left undisturbed. “Over the course of the day, it will start turning black,” Vasquez said. “As it begins turning black, the stench begins.”
Sally Heyman, the county commissioner representing the northern coastal communities in Miami-Dade, said she sometimes put menthol balm on her upper lip to cut the smell from sargassum on particularly bad days.
While the seaweed isn’t linked to the health risks that closed beaches in Miami-Dade and beyond during last year’s red tide outbreak, it’s enough of a blight that Mayor Carlos Gimenez declared it a “crisis” facing the tourism industry in a memo last month announcing emergency action to launch removal efforts.
“It’s a noxious odor,” Heyman said.
Miami-Dade plans daily clean-up of sargassum in the designated “hot spots” with regular heavy build-up of the material, which is a kind of brown algae linked to runoff from fertilizer. Scientists say a warming ocean will make sargassum more prevalent. They link the current spike in sargassum creation to fertilizer runoff from increased farming along the Amazon River in Brazil.
Along with the beaches between 26th and 31st streets, the hot spots targeted for seaweed removal are: South Pointe in South Beach, and beaches along jetties and breakwaters in Haulover and Bal Harbour.
Florida requires Miami-Dade to send out crews ahead of beach cleanup operations who scour the sand for turtle nests. Those are marked off by stakes and tape, directing bulldozers and other equipment to steer clear. Knox, the Imperiled Species manager, said another concern of allowing too much beach work is the heavy vehicles can compact sand too tightly for mother turtles to create nests. July also tends to mark the time when turtle eggs hatch, meaning Miami-Dade’s seaweed crews could imperil hatchlings making their way to the sea. “We try to be extra careful,” Knox said.
Higgins, the county commissioner, said Miami-Dade’s permit frustrations eased when the county turned to a local member of the Fish and Wildlife board.
Rodney Barreto, an owner of the Floridian Partners lobbying firm in Coral Gables and head of the Barreto Group, was recently reappointed to the board by Gov. Ron DeSantis. He said Friday that higher-ups in the administration weren’t aware of Miami-Dade’s complaints.
“There was some confusion and miscommunication,” Barreto said. “I was glad to be helpful.”
Internal emails show county administrators trying to secure a new permit through Wednesday.
“We continue to receive complaints about the foul smell and trash sitting in the water not being able to get picked up because of the seaweed by the 29th Street break waters,” Carlos Fernandez-Quevedo, a manager in the county’s beach-management division, wrote in an email Tuesday to Knox. The next day, in an email with a subject line “Permit Request #10,” the parks manager called the sargassum build-up a “crisis situation” that cleanup crews needed to respond to quickly, without waiting on approval from Tallahassee.
“If there is seaweed in a ‘hot spot,’ we are requesting permission to immediately react and remove it from the beach,” Fernandez-Quevedo wrote. “As part of our procedures, no work will begin before a complete and thorough turtle survey is completed.”
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