The 2023 sargassum season started early at the Bolongo Bay Beach Resort on St. Thomas in the United States Virgin Islands.
Around the end of March, staff launched the response system they have devised over the years in the absence of any official guidance from the government: hand-raking the beaches and spreading the seaweed to dry on the grounds of the 65-room property, which is nestled in a cove on the southern side of the island of about 50,000 people.
As usual, the family-owned resort had to foot the full bill for the response.
It is not alone. Without a national sargassum management strategy or a dedicated pool of funding from the USVI government, the financial burden for cleaning the shorelines in the territory has often fallen squarely on resorts, yacht charterers and other tourism operators.
“We’re in the millions of dollars being spent on mitigation over the last decade,” said Lisa Hamilton, president of the Virgin Islands Hotel and Tourism Association.
Workers with ORB Landscaping and Trucking use rakes and bins to haul massive piles of sargassum away from the Frenchtown boat ramp on St. Thomas on Oct. 20, 2023. (Photo: SUZANNE CARLSON THE BVI BEACON)
She added that the CTO “applauds the efforts of organisations that are searching for and funding educational and start-up initiatives dedicated to repurposing sargassum to benefit our destinations. We will continue to encourage researchers, marine scientists, entrepreneurs and innovators to explore imaginative ways and means of managing sargassum by using it for carbon sequestration, agricultural use and biofuel, for example.”
$25,000 per day
Until a large-scale solution is found, costs will likely continue climbing for tourism properties.
In the USVI, no full spending breakdown has been made public, but a government official said in 2022 that the territory’s hotels collectively spent around $25,000 a day to clean up sargassum during major influxes.
Other numbers emerged there during a public hearing in 2021, when environmental consultant Amy Dempsey said that the 264-room Margaritaville Vacation Club spends around $50,000 a month to remove sargassum, while the 180-room Ritz-Carlton spends more than $500,000 a year and removes as many as six 40-yard bins of sargassum in a day.
“Economically, for places like Margaritaville and a lot of the hotels on east-facing beaches, it is a major cost for them, the sargassum removal,” said Paul Jobsis, director of the Center for Marine and Environmental Science at the University of the Virgin Islands. “And of course their guests don’t like it because it doesn’t feel good when you go swimming in a bunch of sargassum.”
This investigation is the result of a fellowship awarded by the Center for Investigative Journalism’s Training Institute and was made possible in part with the support of Open Society Foundations.
