How can we stem the tide?

Virginia Haley remembers vividly the first day that signaled how bad things were going to get.

In the middle of last summer, Haley, the president and CEO of Visit Sarasota County, already had been working for a few weeks on addressing challenges associated with a red tide bloom that dated back to 2017. To that point, the most significant effects of the red tide had shown up in the southern portion of the county.

It wasn’t anything unusual for the tourism bureau. Red tide is a common, if unpleasant, phenomenon in the region. There was a standard playbook for how to deal with it: Reach out to visitors and redirect them to unaffected beaches so they could still enjoy Sarasota’s most important attraction.

Beginning Aug. 1, that playbook was no longer useful.

“It was just an awful day,” Haley said. “We had intense red tide on every single beach in Sarasota County, and it had come into all the bays.”

The tourism industry was far from the only affected party. For months, red tide took its toll on Sarasota, dominating the attention of the entire community. Beaches emptied as dead marine life lined the shores; photos of the carnage made national headlines. A foul smell wafted throughout the county, reaching as far inland some days as Interstate 75. Residents complained of respiratory issues. Businesses bemoaned declining revenues.

The bloom, which didn’t dissipate until February, prompted an unprecedented response from local and state officials, who treated this red tide event as an emergency on par with a hurricane. The governor declared a state of emergency. The regional coordination brought together representatives from a number of county departments and each Sarasota municipality.

Looking back, those officials believe they did a good job of handling the new challenges posed by the intensity of the red tide.

“While I hope we never have to deal with a red tide event like this again, I think the plans and things we did collaboratively across all the cities and county departments proved to help in response, and that we would do the same type of thing in the future,” said Rich Collins, Sarasota County’s director of emergency services.

Still, the all-hands-on-deck response spoke to the bloom’s intensity and duration, which stakeholders throughout Sarasota described as tangibly different than earlier red tide events.

“I think it changed everything,” said Stevie Freeman-Montes, the city of Sarasota’s sustainability manager. “From my perspective and my role here at the city, it was really traumatic, I think, as a community. We kind of went through this joint, collective trauma of seeing such a negative impact on our environment.”

So, as the community continues to recover from a particularly brutal red tide, what lessons are there to be learned? In the first installment of a two-part series, The Observer is examining the underlying causes that shape the algae bloom, clarifying some of the most pressing questions surrounding the topic and measuring the severity of the most recent outbreak.

Pain and growth

Last year’s red tide bloom created intense, pressing local interest in something that’s been around for hundreds of years.

Scientists first officially identified Karenia brevis, the microscopic organism responsible for Florida’s red tide, in the 1940s. But the phenomenon has been traced back centuries, with Spanish explorers writing about it in the 1500s.

Although red tide is nothing new, even experts still lack the quality information necessary to optimally observe and track the algae blooms.

“Compare this to the National Weather Service when they’re trying to predict the weather,” said Richard Pierce, senior scientist at Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium. “... We have nowhere near the monitoring or sensing ability for the oceanic environment as the government has for the atmospheric environment, so we need a lot more.”

This shortage of authoritative data on the topic butted up against a spike in demand for explanations about why, exactly, Sarasota was dealing with such a devastating red tide. Resident groups across the county brought in speakers to share information about red tide and offer suggestions about how people could minimize their impact.

“It really, I think, made everybody want to learn more and get organized on what were the causes and what we can do,” Freeman-Montes said.

Lee Hayes Byron, head of the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences Extension in Sarasota County, spoke to her organization’s increased outreach efforts in the second half of 2018. The extension already offered courses on Florida-friendly lawn maintenance that preached the importance of avoiding the introduction of potentially harmful nutrients into the water. Suddenly, that became a topic of broad community interest.

Freeman-Montes and Hayes Byron both described a sort of silver lining in last year’s red tide. The severity of the situation served as a call to action of sorts for residents and officials, creating a new level of focus on environmental sensitivity.

“We’ve been working on this for a long time, but the urgency the bloom brought brings additional attention to the potential for improvements,” Hayes Byron said.

Despite the testimony of many residents, by certain metrics, the recent red tide bloom was not the worst of all time. By duration, it was the third-longest bloom of the 21st century. Officials speculated on factors that amplified the severity of the issues.

Scott Montgomery, Sarasota County emergency management section chief, said strong winds pushed the scent of red tide further inland than he could ever remember. Haley said the omnipresence of smartphones and social media facilitated the spread of shocking images of red tide’s devastation.

Rather than quibble over the precise severity of the bloom, though, Sarasota leaders want to capitalize on the groundswell of public demand for action on red tide. There’s no denying the impact the bloom had on the community. The question on the public’s mind: Now what?

“The people who were affected don’t really want to hear it wasn’t the worst one ever,” Hayes Byron said. “They want to know what we can do to fix it.”

For many residents and officials, more awareness is not enough. A desire to meaningfully address the issues associated with red tide has led to increased investment in scientific research, deliberation about how government can best assist in the fight and the creation of new activist groups demanding swift action— all of which are the subject of the second part of The Observer’s series on red tide, coming April 11.