Playa del Carmen, Q.R. — Playa del Carmen’s Secretary of Sustainable Environment and Climate Change is preparing a legal appeal against federal permits that authorized an artificial breakwater system.
The federal permits were granted to a central Playa del Carmen hotel earlier this year that gave them permission to install the geotubes. It was in early May when the hotel installed the artificial system in front of their hotel to prevent beach erosion.
María de Lourdes Várguez Ocampo, the Solidaridad Secretary of Sustainable Environment and Climate Change, says they are appealing the project on grounds that it is doing more harm than good.
Várguez Ocampo says the city did not authorize the project which should have involved an environmental study, but instead, is a project the city sees lacking environmental coherence.
“It is not an environmental impact study that is coherent between what it proposes and what it does, that is where I see the problem,” she said acknowledging that it has federal permits.
She said from the start the Hyatt hotel project showed “errors” due to inconsistencies such as what the project sought to do, to the (where) placement of the geotubes, which are in the federal zone. Due to their placement, machinery cannot pass, she pointed out.
“This is affecting us because we cannot use machinery in the area. What we also see is that due to nature itself, these geotubes are going to become covered with algae and can be a danger to the population,” she added.
