A cloudless sky greeted Shannon Waddell and friends in Miami Beach for their weekend getaway from Atlanta, and the day might have qualified as postcard perfect if not for the rotting blanket of sea grass blocking their barefoot path to the ocean.
“It’s so pretty and blue out there,” Waddell, 21, said from her perch on a day bed on the beach outside the Edition Hotel off 26th Street. “And ugly and brown right here. ... It’s kind of gross.”
Vacation memories like that have Miami-Dade leaders scrambling to tackle an unprecedented inundation of sargassum this summer. After weeks of using tractors to churn the seaweed back into the surf, the county this week plans to deploy bulldozers, front-end loaders and dump trucks to actually scoop up the unwanted grass and haul it away.
Read more at our news partner the Miami Herald.
