At least 44 manatee deaths were linked to red tide, the highest such count ever. Dead dolphins, manatees and other marine mammals were removed in large numbers from the beaches and coastal waters.īetween July and November last year, the number of dead manatees tragically reached 1,003, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission reported. Petersburg called for a state of emergency in order to clean up dead sea animals from the beaches. Last July, Pinellas County officials reported collecting 600 tons of dead fish as the red tide peaked. “And the fish kill was very small.”īut that has changed in recent years. “I remember it being a little stinky down at the beach,” she said. “It is like red tide on steroids.” Back in the 1970s, she recalled, red tide would subside in a week or two. “But I will tell you the red tide in recent years is not like it used to be,” she said. Now a real estate agent in Pinellas County, Norris said growing up in Florida has left her no stranger to red tide. “That’s when I realized how awful it was,” she said. She ultimately learned that some people in the neighborhood were temporarily relocating. “I said to myself how are people even living out here,” she said. Norris, whose father is a member of the Oneida Tribe, recalled feeling unwell for days, her chest tightening up. “I rushed back to my van, rolled up the windows and blasted the air conditioners because I could not breathe,” she said. She was out by the beach delivering online purchases from Amazon to the wealthy residents along the St. Petersburg in the state’s Tampa Bay area. She cannot shake off that sickening, nauseous feeling in the summer of 2018 from the stench of dead fish, turtles and manatees rotting in reddish-brown coastal waters along the shorelines of St. But in the last three years, red tide has become a serious yearlong problem for the state and city authorities, fisheries and tourism industries, as well as residents near shoreline.Īlicia Norris, 52, a mother of three, has experienced it first hand. Occurring almost every year in late summer or early fall, red tide algae is most prevalent along Florida’s southwest coastal areas. DeSantis also listed red tide among his priorities during his recent State of the State address on the opening day of the 2022 legislative session. Originally established in 1999, the task force had been dormant for over 15 years. DeSantis had reactivated the task force in August 2021 and appointed 11 experts to energize its mandate. “The task force has ignored the elephant in the room because state regulators are not holding the polluting industries accountable through enforcement action,” she added.įlorida Gov. Lopez said untreated sewage discharge, nutrient runoffs from various sources, and toxic waste from phosphorus mining leaking into Florida’s open waters act as a booster for red tide, which thrives in nutrient rich conditions. “The task force recommends throwing taxpayer money at unproven mitigation technologies,” said Jaclyn Lopez, Florida director at the Center for Biological Diversity, adding: “If the state regulators instead just stopped pollution at the source by holding polluters accountable, Florida would have a much better chance at turning the corner on its water quality crisis.” The Clean Waterways Act of 2020, they have noted, doesn’t require agricultural interests to reduce phosphorus runoff and continues to rely on what is effectively a system of voluntary compliance. The impacts of climate change, which the task force said “may be impossible to change,” contribute to the algal blooms “through a complex variety of mechanisms including warmer water temperatures, changes in salinity, changes in rainfall patterns… changes in coastal upwelling, and sea level rise.”īut environmental advocates criticized the task force’s latest recommendations, arguing that the panel failed to hold the polluters accountable and ignored the most obvious solutions, which involve better enforcement of existing laws by the state regulators. What the task force described as a “prolonged 2017-2019 red tide event” began with an algal bloom on Lake Okeechobee and resulted in “estimated total losses of nearly $1 billion in revenue and an additional loss of $178 million in tax revenue in 23 Gulf coast counties.” 10, the task force’s report recommends more research to determine the causes of red tides, more investment in mitigation technologies and continued work under the Clean Waterways Act of 2020. The algal blooms, which at one point in 2018 covered 90 percent of the lake’s surface, can have devastating impacts on ecological resources and communities, causing respiratory and eye irritation in humans and “widespread reports of fish, sea turtle, marine mammal, and other wildlife mortalities,” according to the Florida Harmful Algal Bloom Task Force.
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