No Letup In Caribbean Seaweed Invasion; .5 Million Tons Removed From Just One Popular Cancun Beach
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For Mexico, whose Caribbean coastline attracts more than 10 million visitors and generates $8 billion in tourism-related revenue a year, the arrival of sargassum became a cabinet-level crisis. When José Eduardo Mariscal de la Selva, the director general of Cancun’s maritime department, received a photo one morning in July from his beach cleaners, he assumed it was a joke. Within days, the country’s tourism and environment ministers were touring Cancun to assess the calamity.
Mexico’s tourism industry is like an aging gladiator, having battled swine flu outbreaks, drug-war violence and intense storms over the past decade — including Hurricane Patricia, which sent sunbathers fleeing the Pacific coast last week. Now, some local authorities question whether seaweed might strike the fatal blow.
“Beaches are what we sell to the whole world and what we depend on, directly or indirectly, for all our income,” Mariscal said. And hotel guests paying $500 a night do not want to open the shades to find paradise matted down under layers of stinking, fly-infested algae.
Since the July invasion, Mexico has launched a herculean cleanup effort. Along the coast of Quintana Roo state, the government hired 5,000 day laborers in four-hour shifts to rake seaweed from more than 100 miles of beaches. From one popular stretch of Cancun, workers hauled off half a million cubic feet of seaweed — more than 1,000 truckloads, Mariscal said. Cancun gave local boozers the chance to leave the town drunk tank early if they put in time on the seaweed chain-gangs. The federal government has budgeted $9 million so far to remove the stinky mess, and hotels are expected to pay millions per month for further maintenance.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/mexico-deploys-its-navy-to-face-its-latest-threat-monster-seaweed/2015/10/28/cea8ac28-710b-11e5-ba14-318f8e87a2fc_story.html
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This pic was taken in Barbados~
