Riviera Maya, Q.R. — The Secretary of the Navy says they will step up their efforts in the fight against the arriving sargassum along the state’s coast. Rear Admiral Alejandro López Centeno, coordinator of the National Strategy for Sargasso Care says two oceanic collection vessels, two sargassum vessels and 1,500 meters of containment barriers will be used to help prevent the seaweed clusters from landing on Playa del Carmen beaches.
“What has hit us hard is the bad weather. We have a sargacera vessel that has been operating in recent days, but due to the same bad weather, we had to send it to a shelter…now, it is working again,” he said adding that the barriers were initially removed to be repaired, but new barriers will be placed instead.
“The municipality is going to give us another mooring point and we will have two sargassum vessels plus the barrier. We hope to be more efficient in the collection in that less reaches the beaches,” he explained.
He says that the barriers contains between 30 and 70 percent of the algae during the night, so that in the mornings, their boats can collect it, however, if the swells or the winds are strong, the seaweed breaches the barrier, which does not make them ineffective, but only that the weather makes the collection more challenging.
The Rear Admiral says that the continued bad weather has significantly affected the fight against the containment and collection of the seaweed, because due to the windy weather conditions, one boat has already sank, which they have not yet been able to recover.
