Piney Point: The environmental disaster may be fueling Red Tide. Is it safe to eat seafood? Here’s how Red Tide affects what you eat.Ĭan I go fishing? The state is limiting saltwater fishing. “So it’s a very long winded answer to say no, we can’t tell you what’s going to happen in October.” If they do, the county and our municipalities stand ready to respond with cleanup efforts.” “But there are still significant blooms offshore and south of us that could become problematic. “Conditions have been significantly better over the last several days, and that’s because the currents and winds have been working in our favor,” Pinellas County spokesperson Tony Fabrizio wrote in an email. Now, as conditions improve, all eyes turn to the gulf coast, where blooms typically form during the late summer. Scientists say the nitrogen-rich wastewater could have exacerbated the Red Tide bloom that was already in the bay when the release took please. The state authorized the release, fearing a leaking reservoir could have caused a collapse that would have flooded the surrounding community. But this Red Tide outbreak started in June, which Stumpf said is “doubly unusual.”īut there was also an unusual event in April: the release of 215 million gallons of polluted wastewater into the bay from the old site of the Piney Point fertilizer plant in Manatee County. What’s unusual about this recent bloom is that Karenia brevis typically forms off the Pinellas coast in late summer or early fall. Meanwhile, onshore patches are causing fish kills further south, off the coast of Sarasota County. Offshore patches were moving north this week, resulting in fish kills between 2.5 and 42 miles off the Hernando County coast. Pinellas is in a “period of uncertainty,” said Hubbard. Related: Red Tide isn’t just bad for fish, as a Tampa Bay man learned in the ER The agency said it received eight reports of fish kills along the Pinellas coast from Belleair Shore to Dunedin. Petersburg and Tampa.īlooms have moved north to Hernando and Citrus counties, according to Kate Hubbard, a research scientists leading the conservation commission’s Red Tide monitoring and research. But this year, much of that sea life was killed in Tampa Bay itself, where the blooms resided for several weeks while poisoning fish off St. The total waste collected now stands at 1,836, which nears the total of 1,860 tons the county collected during the 2018 Red Tide outbreak that afflicted Florida’s west coast. But in the weeks since, just 13 more tons have been recovered as of Monday, according to the county. 9, the county said crews had picked up a total of 1,823 tons. Related: Here’s how climate change could make future Red Tide blooms worseĪ sign that the Red Tide situation has improved since the fish kills inundated the coastline this past summer is that the amount of dead sea life and debris picked up has declined considerably.
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