NORTH BAY VILLAGE, FLA. (WSVN) - Concerned residents in North Bay Village took to the streets to call for the region’s waterways to be protected after the recent fish kill in Biscayne Bay.
7News cameras captured demonstrators as they held signs and made their way down the John F. Kennedy Causeway, Saturday afternoon.
“Hey, hey, save our bay!” they chanted.
North Bay Village Mayor Brent Latham said the current environmental outlook is grim, and action needs to be taken.
“We’ve seen the fish kill, we’ve seen the algae blooms, but when we start to lose our fauna here in the bay, we’ve seen the shift from a living bay to a dying bay,” he said.
Biscayne Bay, Latham said, is a waterway in crisis.
“We’re seeing a tipping point in our bay, and so we need to raise awareness among citizens,” he said. “We need to raise awareness among our residents and the communities around us.”
The mayor organized Saturday’s march through the village after finding a dead loggerhead turtle floating in the bay over the weekend.
The upsetting sight followed an algae bloom and fish kill in recent days.
“We have record heat, we have a tremendous amount of algae in the bay, contaminants in the bay,” said City of Miami Mayor Francis Suarez.
Now these neighbors want solutions from surrounding cities and Miami-Dade County.
Latham has one suggestion for local leaders.
“Transition from sewer to septic, to promote drainage and filtering of our stormwater and to get the fertilizers, pesticides and chemicals out of the ground water,” he said.
These are issues that, Suarez said, the city has worked on.
“We’re doing everything we can in the City of Miami to help with the de-oxygenation of the bay, by putting pumps in the system,” he said. “We’re also making sure our sewer system isn’t contaminating the bay any further.”
Among the steps city officials are taking is passing an ordinance to ban fertilizing during the summer months to prevent algae from forming.
Participants in the march hope the signal they are sending will help protect the waterway for them and future generations.
Suarez said the city is also spending $300,000 on a 1,000 inlet project to keep plastic and phosphates out of the bay.
Copyright 2024 Sunbeam Television Corp. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.