Rhonda Haag, Chief Resilience Officer from Monroe County, joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about sargassum.
Sargassum is naturally occurring seaweed in the ocean.
Haag said, “It’s always been there, forever and ever. But what makes it worse over the past few years is the warming of the oceans. As the water gets warmer, then the sargassum increases, and you get more of these blooms, and of course they find their way into the Keys. So I don’t anticipate it getting any better over the next few years. I anticipate it only getting worse. Now, that doesn’t mean that every year it’s going to be super bad. This year is looking like it’s going to be a pretty bad year. Last year wasn’t as bad, but it’s still going to be much worse than normal, probably from here on out, just because of the warming waters, and that brings that extra loads in.”
Calls come into the county about sargassum.
Haag said, “Especially right now in the summer. This is when it’s worse, because it comes flooding into the canals, and it clogs them up, the boats can’t get up, it stinks, and I want to let people know, , that smell is, it can be irritating to breathe, so you don’t want to jump in your canal, you don’t want to breathe it. If it’s really bad, probably the best thing is to go to the front yard or go inside, because it can irritate your lungs if you have breathing problems. And when it decays, and really, a lot of this is what our canal restoration program is based on. So, when this sargassum over the years comes into the canals and sinks to the bottom, it decays, and then that’s when it turns into this organic muck, and we did Big Pine Key and Key Largo, we’ve removed muck as part of our canal restoration program up to five feet, and you can imagine, that’s a lot of muck over the decades that we removed from these canals, and that’s really decaying sargassum and seaweed on the bottom of the canals, and when that happens, what happens is that takes the oxygen out of the water, so it doesn’t just stink, it takes the oxygen out of the water, and then you lose your marine life, because you don’t have any oxygen in the water, so just like you and I need oxygen to breathe from the air, marine life needs oxygen, dissolved oxygen in the water to be able to breathe, and so that’s why we have so many problems with our canals, with the decaying muck on the bottom. Nobody likes to see it on the beaches, but it’s just a bigger problem in the canals with what’s going on there.”
Because there’s no oxygen in the water, scum can form on the bottom of the canal.
Haag said, “You get that stuff off the bottom of the canal, rises and mixes with the sargassum on top, and so it’s really messy. And we’re about to restore Canal 82 here on July 7. We’re going to get the notice to proceed, and we’re going to get that muck out of there. There’s probably several feet of muck in that canal in the back. There’s at least at the dead end, there’s at least four or five feet of muck, so they’re going to be really happy. They’ve been waiting for this for several years, and have been working with the county. They’re already paying an assessment, but it’s no joke, this sargassum, and unfortunately, people ask, is there a program the county has? We don’t, because none of the grants will fund the removal of the sargassum, because we did it one time several years ago, for Key Largo, we did a demonstration purpose. The state gave us 100,000 and we had a boat that went in, and if you have to remove the trash, you can legally take it back out to sea, as long as it’s in the flowway. But it was every week, they made it around Key Largo every week, but it was like the next day or two, it all came back in. So, as long as the winds are pushing it in, it does temporary good to take it out, but you don’t want to spend your money, we get limited grant money as it is, and we want to be able to spend it on long-term restoration, so we’re not allowed to spend grant funds on temporary fixes like this. We get a lot of questions like that. So, the best thing, what I recommend is, especially for people living on canals, you have to be more proactive now, and you can install these air curtains.”
Air curtains are an airline you place at the mouth of the canal and a big disc blows bubbles through it.
Haag said, “What happens is the bubbles at the top will keep out the floating sargassum. Now, on days where you get 45, 50 mile an hour winds, it won’t be able to hold it all back, but at least be able to keep out the vast majority. And so this is what I’m really recommending for people on canals, and anytime the county restores a canal that had a muck problem, where we had to take out, one or two or three or four or five feet of muck, then we place an air curtain at the edge of that canal. There’s a negative part, there’s an assessment that people have to pay, but that’s to maintain the air curtain and pay the vendor has to come out and dive the canal every three months and clean everything out. They’re high maintenance, they do a lot. They pump in 24 hours a day, and they’re keeping on a lot of seaweed, and so they’re high maintenance. They require quite a bit of maintenance and the power to power them, and then they wear out, like in five or six years, you have to replace them. But so much better when you have some type of air curtain at that mouth of your canal, and then it just keeps everything out. There’s new vendors that came into the county. If people are interested, they can contact me, and I can give them the name of vendors, and they can go ahead and hire somebody to install one.”
Air curtains do require a permit.
Haag said, “The hardest thing about getting a permit for the air curtains is when you place the air curtain at the mouth of the canal, typically you have to place it in an arc, so when that the seagrass comes in, it doesn’t stack up right in front of the people’s houses on the ocean side there, and so if you place it at an angle, what happens is when the sargassum comes in, it keeps rolling on down the shore. That’s what’s supposed to happen. We’re not allowed to cause any negative effects to the people on the shoreline, either. So, it’s a delicate balance between the people in the canal and the people on the shoreline. We don’t want to negatively affect anyone, but they’re very effective at keeping out the majority of sargassum.”
Is grant money used at all?
Haag said, “Our whole entire canal restoration program is funded with grant money from the state, and then we have $12 million from the federal government from the BP oil spill, that’s the funds that are funding the restorations on the Avenues in Big Pine Key. We’re going to start those in January or February of 2027. We plan on just banging those out. They did all have to vote to pay the assessment, so they all are well aware of the assessment that’s coming. It’s probably going to be about $100 a month, so it’s not that cheap, but their air curtains are high maintenance, because they’re just a lot of maintenance involved in the electricity and everything. But your canal is like the difference between night and day. I have realtors call me that people, when they look for houses, they specifically look for houses on canals that either have the weed gates in place already, and so they look for houses on those canals because they want good canals, and they want to be able to use them, and so you don’t have to wait for the county to come along and do a restoration. You can do your own. We have vendors that offer that service, and they’ll get the permits for you, and you can protect yourselves. We actually did a little demonstration project to see if an air curtain alone would help just bring back the levels of dissolved oxygen in a canal enough to support marine life. It didn’t go quite that far, but it did offer some level of additional oxygen. It’s just not enough, because you got a big canal that’s way deep, and the air curtain is right at the mouth, so that all that oxygen doesn’t carry all the way back to the canal.”
The Duck Key breakwater is fully done.
Haag said, “That was a beautiful job. And the Rock Harbor breakwater in Key Largo is almost done. I say it’s about 90% done. We just have to go ahead and put the air curtain in, but their jetty is in place, so that’s already protecting the canals behind there. It’s keeping out these jetties, breaker waters, also keeping out the sargassum, because they got that rock wall, and so it’s not just for storm surge, it also does a really good job of helping keep out the sargassum. You still need an air curtain at the opening, and that’s what we’re putting in, but very good. And Tavernier Breakwater is about halfway done, so we’ll be wrapping that up, probably by the end of July, and we’re going to start Canal 82 right after the July 4 holiday. We have to close the canal when we do a canal restoration, so there can be no boat traffic. So we wanted to allow people to be able to have Father’s Day weekend and July 4 boating weekend, and then their canal will be fully closed for four months. Then in January, then we’re going to bang out about $20 million worth of projects, all the ones on the Avenues in Big Pine, except for one canal 266. We’re going to redo that one. We did it before, but now we’re going to do a make it backfill a little bit shallower, so you get that oxygen all the way down to the end of the thing and into the canal, and then another one, Big Pine 255. We’re going to do a mock removal, so a lot of activity in the Lower Keys coming up for next year.”
Where do canal funds come from?
Haag said, “They come from what’s called the Stewardship funds. That’s a $20 million allotment. Not every year, we have to work really hard to get it, and I have to give a shout out to Lisa Tennison, our legislative affairs director, because she works really hard to ensure that legislators give that appropriation every year, because they don’t have to, and they have stopped it in years, when that’s a poor economy, or whatever, but yes, that’s in the budget this year, so we hope to use that again to keep the momentum going with canal restoration in Monroe County. That 20 million, that’s divided up between the municipalities and some of the couple of utilities, but they all use it for water quality work.”
A lot of fish kills also are reported.
Haag said, “There is a Fish and Wildlife Commission hotline number. You can call the report. Fish kill hotline number is 1-800-636-0511. That’s Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission, 1-800-636-0511. They can at least report it, so again, not a lot that can be done. Nobody has the money to come and take sargasm out of 500 canals in the Keys. The beaches do get a little tourist development council money, so the beaches can at least stay mostly clean, but the canals are just another story. Just want to be proactive and get your own weed gate. Mitigate is all you can do. You can’t stop it in the ocean, and it does provide benefits. It provides habitat for little creatures and things like that. So out in the ocean it’s a good thing. We just don’t want it in the canals.”