Worst Year Ever For Rotting Algae on French Coast

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Worst Year Ever For Rotting Algae on French Coast

Monday, August 17th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed

At this time of year, with summer starting to kick in around Europe, the amount of tourists having holidays or day trips to France is extremely high. With much better weather than the Uk, cheaper food, and very nice beaches, France is normally an easy option for holidaymakers.

However, this summer, rather than beaches full of ice cream eating tourists. The beaches have been layered with some algae that is deadly. Tonnes of the rotting algae has been washed up along miles of the northern France coastline. When the algae is normally in the sea, it has no harmful effects, but once it begin to rot on the beaches, it lets out toxic fumes.

Already this summer, a man has become seriously ill from the algae. The 27 year old vet had to be dragged out of metre deep algae after his horse collapsed and died from the inhaling the toxic gases.

Many of the councils affected by the algae are spending thousands on cleaning the beaches. However, over 70 beaches have currently been reported to have the algae, making it a very tough cleanup job. No doubt the French economy will be affected as the visiting public are being warned away from the dangerous beaches.

People visiting for short breaks won’t be the only people turned off by the beaches. People who have holiday homes out there may not want to visit them if they won’t get to visit the beaches. Not only will this lose the French government money, but also the home owners as they will still end up paying for their French home Insurance even though they didn’t actually use the house.

Insurance for holiday homes is really not cheap, and if you don’t get the use out of the house in the year, it does feel like you’ve wasted money. Of course there will still be some people who will choose to holiday in their second homes in an attempt to not lose out on things like Insurance for second homes.

Many environmentalists blame pollution from intensive farming. Their argument is that the algae is rotting and being washed up because harmful materials from the farming get into the sea and effect the algae. We’ll just have to wait and see what affect this will have on French tourism.

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