JACKSONVILLE BEACH, Fla. \u2014 Ahead of the holiday weekend, if you\u2019re heading to the beach, you\u2019ll want to look out for Sargassum. The seaweed algae has washed up along several parts of our coasts, creating a terrible smell.<\/p>\n
Action News Jax Chief Meteorologist explains it\u2019s come earlier than usual.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is unseasonably early and it might be related to the warmer than average ocean temperatures that we have,\u201d Buresh said.<\/p>\n
He says it usually peaks in the fall season.<\/p>\n
>>> STREAM ACTION NEWS JAX LIVE <<<<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n \u201cThis year and some previous years too, we\u2019ve had a really large fields of these seaweed beds, sargassum, that has been moving over the Atlantic, Caribbean, parts of the Gulf,\u201d Buresh said.<\/p>\n If the winds are just right, it\u2019ll end up on our beaches.<\/p>\n \u201cYou couldn\u2019t walk down here it was so bad,\u201d said Kathleen Lewis. She\u2019s lived near the beach since the 70s. She says this is one of the worst she\u2019s seen.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s been at least 10 days that it\u2019s been sitting out here smelling. And then the air picks it up and carries the smell of old, dead, rotten fish into our houses and into our yards,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n [DOWNLOAD: <\/b>Free Action News Jax app for alerts as news breaks<\/b><\/a>]<\/b><\/p>\n The Florida Department of Health says the smell is the algae decomposing.<\/p>\n Kathleen hopes ahead of the holiday weekend, city officials can help manage it.<\/p>\n \u201cThey said they were having someone come and clean it up and they started at the north end of the beach and they were going to put it into piles, it looks like they may have done that,\u201d Lewis said.<\/p>\n As people head to the beaches, Buresh says for the most part, it\u2019s harmless.<\/p>\n [SIGN UP: <\/b>Action News Jax Daily Headlines Newsletter<\/b><\/a>] <\/b><\/p>\n But it can cause irritation.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you\u2019re susceptible to pollen, allergies in general then Sargassum can be something that causes itchy eyes, and can irritate you a little bit if you\u2019re in it but of course the best advice is to avoid it,\u201d Buresh said.<\/p>\n Action News Jax reached out to Jacksonville Beach officials to see if they plan to remove the sargassum ahead of the holiday weekend. We have not heard back.<\/p>\n Click here<\/b><\/a> to download the free Action News Jax news and weather apps, <\/b>click here<\/b><\/a> to download the Action News Jax Now app for your smart TV and <\/b>click here<\/b><\/a> to stream Action News Jax live.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"JACKSONVILLE BEACH, Fla. \u2014 Ahead of the holiday weekend, if you\u2019re heading to the beach, you\u2019ll want to…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":817484,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5136],"tags":[12189,15619,5229,17358,12883,13816,18248,30368,3188,723,86407,24012,11561,46580,12869,7310,12872,20027,300703,336414,245956,336413,425,80262,57513,28496,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":["post-817483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jacksonville","tag-action_news","tag-action_news_jack","tag-america","tag-atlantic","tag-beach","tag-ben_becker","tag-burris","tag-caribbean","tag-fl","tag-florida","tag-florida_department_of_health","tag-gulf","tag-jack","tag-jacks","tag-jacks_beach","tag-jacksonville","tag-jacksonville_beach","tag-jasmine","tag-jasmine_butler","tag-jazmine_butler","tag-kathleen","tag-kathleen_lewis","tag-local","tag-mike_burris","tag-tanika","tag-tanika_hughes","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=817483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/817484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=817483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=817483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=817483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}