FORT MYERS BEACH
A massive machine on the beach is helping get the shore back to normal. It separates the debris from the sand which is an important task to make the beach safe again.
The machine is piling through mounds of debris picked up off the roads of Fort Myers Beach.
It’s taking the dirty sand and making it clean with a sand sifting machine.
Miles and miles of clean white sand turned dark and dirty clearly showing a difference between what Fort Myers Beach looked like before and after Ian.
Florida Gulf Coast University marine and earth science professor, James Douglass, recently completed a week-long study where he and other scientists looked at what’s in the Gulf of Mexico’s waters after the hurricane.
“There’s a little bit of everything in the sand right now, from pollution to germs to pieces of glass,” Douglass said.
Douglass said the sand on the beach is nowhere close to immune from the hazards and debris left behind.
“One of the things that can be mixed in with the sand is what my colleague here at the university studies.. microplastics,” Douglass said. “So little bits of human debris, little plastics that get shredded by the wind, shavings of every kind of human product imaginable are sort of mixed in with the natural rocks and shells of the beach. And those things that can hurt sea life if sea life eats them, and they can leach a little bit of toxic chemicals into the water too.”
Luckily the machine is on the beach sifting through the sand and screening it for debris.
The county hired a company named ICS Materials to oversee the operation on the beach.
The tractor loads the hopper or the big container with dirty sand and then the sand sifter filters items into two sections, big and small.
Big items are then dropped into a pile on the left and small items get dropped into a pile on the right.
Clean sand goes up the tall conveyer belt and adds onto big piles of big sand which will then be used to restore the shoreline of Fort Myers Beach.
A spokesman with ICS Materials told WINK News his crews have picked up 80,000 cubic yards of debris.
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October 31, 2022 at 08:14AM
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Sand sifting machine helping Fort Myers Beach cleanup - Wink News
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