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And another environmental problem that San Pedro deals with yearly is sargassum. While it's not an issue right now, it will likely wash up on their shores in mounds next year. And they Town Council is trying to prepare for it by combining efforts with the island's resorts and NGOs. The mayor spoke more about it yesterday.
Gualberto Nunez, Mayor, San Pedro Town
"Luckily at the moment we don't have much sargassum coming in, sargassum has been an ongoing issue for years now, it is something that, it' affects tourism, it affects all these resorts that we have to put a lot of resources to be able to clean it to make sure that our beaches are in a good state for the tourists to enjoy, however, we don't have the amount of sargassum coming in at the moment."
"Hopefully we don't have as much but it is something that we are partnering up with the different resorts, the different NGOs and all of them so that we can tackle the problem when it comes. "
"At the moment, we're taking it and piling it up in different areas and we're taking it as grades, so when it comes to the amount that has a lot of sand, we're using it for other areas of the beach so that the sand is not taken somewhere else but the top layers then it is delivered to other areas where people are asking for it for landfill so they're utilizing it that way. The issue with the sargo-blocks, when we had that plan initially, it seemed like a very good plan or a good way to go but the issue there is that we would have needed so much sargassum to be able to build an amount of blocks and it was going to be to the point that probably we would have had to import sargassum, which is contrary to what we want." "
Government says it is in exploratory talks to create a biomass facility with sargassum - which would be a first in the region.
