The head of Mexico’s Navy acknowledged Wednesday that the country’s Caribbean coast is facing an atypical problem with a kind of seaweed known as sargassum and that Navy boats assigned to catch it before it drifts ashore are working poorly, and are totally unable to handle the excessive amount of sargassum that the currents are bringing ashore.
Navy Secretary José Ojeda said the boats sit low in the water with little freeboard — the space between the boats’ sides and the waterline — making them risky to operate when there are waves.
He acknowledged that almost all the sargassum — brown algae — collected recently were shoveled off beaches, not caught at sea.
“We are definitely trying to prevent it from reaching the beaches, but sometimes it is complicated because of the tides or bad weather,” Ojeda said. “We cannot take the boats out, they have very little of what we call freeboard … and it is risky to take them out.”
The Navy currently has 11 sargassum-collecting boats operating in the area. But the Navy’s own figures show the portion they have been able to collect before it hits the beach has been falling.
In 2020, the Navy collected 4% of sargassum at sea, while 96% was raked off beaches. But that figure fell to 3% in 2021 and about 1% as of April 2022.
Ojeda said the amount collected at sea was about 4% in the last week of May.
Ojeda advocated installing more floating barriers but acknowledged that even that approach faces problems.
The resort of Cancun has not been hit as hard this year as the Riviera Maya, just to the south. A carpet of sargassum extends from there almost all the way down to Tulum, further south.
On Friday, an independent monitoring network estimated that 45 of the 80 beaches monitored on the Caribbean coast had “excessive” or large amounts of sargassum. Only three beaches — including two on the island of Isla Mujeres — had none.
“Yes, there has been more than in past years, it has gotten beyond us,” Ojeda acknowledged. “We are aware that it is affecting tourism in some places, some beaches.”
Source: Excelsior
The Cancun Post
