Beach hotels in Quintana Roo are spending $ 70,000 to $ 90,000 a month to contain Sargassum and remove the algae from the beach, the head of an industry group said.
Antonio Chávez, President of the Riviera Maya Hotel Association, said the effort was so high because the hotels had installed their own Sargassum barriers in the sea and had to maintain them daily.
Using machines to remove the stinking, unsightly seaweed from beaches and hiring workers to remove it manually add to the cost of hotels.
During the Sargassum season, which is slated to last eight months this year, hotels in destinations like Cancun and Playa del Carmen will each spend more than $ 500,000 on dispute and removal efforts, Chavez said.
He said the navy’s removal of Sargassum from the sea was welcome, but noted that the amounts it extracts dwarfs the amounts that reach the famous white sand beaches of Quintana Roo.
The Sargassum situation in Quintana Roo on Tuesday afternoon. Sargassum surveillance network
While the Navy has reported that around 500 tons of Sargassum have been removed from the coast, hotels have cleared more than 5,000 tons from the beaches, Chavez said. That is evidence that the Navy is not using enough Sargassum collection vessels, he said.
Chavez also said naval ships had nowhere to dock north of Quintana Roo to dump the collected Sargassum. Instead, they come as close to the coast as possible and put the Sargassum back in the water, where small boats collect it and bring it ashore for disposal. The exercise will slow down the whole process of the Sargassum collection, Chavez said, adding that the taxes the communities levy on foreign tourists should go into the construction of a wharf where naval ships can dock.
The latest map released by the Quintana Roo Sargassum Monitoring Network shows that the seaweed is abundant on most of the state’s north coast, with excessive levels on beaches in the Tulum area.
However, the Navy announced this week that arrivals from Sargassum are expected to decline in August and September due to changing ocean currents. The first reductions should be seen within the next two weeks, said Lieutenant Reynaldo Varga of the Navy’s Gulf and Caribbean Oceanography Institute.
With reports from The economist and Travel newspaper
