Red tide florida map now9/25/2023 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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