Sand on Fort Myers Beach being cleaned of the debris hiding inside

Lee County is working to clean up the debris on the beaches you can see and the debris you can’t.

The county uses a machine to sift through the sand to separate it from the hazards hiding inside. That includes piles of sand removed from the roads on Fort Myers beach after the hurricane.

Crews are constantly reminded that all the stuff they find once belonged to someone.

Miles and miles of clean white sand turned dark and dirty. The before-and-after comparison for Fort Myers Beach is difficult to comprehend.

“There’s a little bit of everything in the sand right now, from pollution to germs to pieces of glass,” said James Douglass, a marine and earth science professor at Florida Gulf Coast University.

Douglass recently completed a week-long study where he and other scientists looked at what was in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico after the hurricane.

Douglass says the sand on Fort Myers Beach was not immune from the hazards and debris.

“One of the things that can be mixed in with the sand is what my colleague here at the university studies. Microplastics. 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,” Douglass said.

The big red sand sifting machine is on Fort Myers Beach to sift through the sand and screen it from debris. Some of the toxins hiding in the sand, including gasoline and other chemicals, can’t be separated using the large sifting machine.

WINK News reporter Emma Heaton climbed on board the machine to learn how it works.

A tractor loads the hopper, or the big container on the machine, with dirty sand. The sand sifter then filters items into two groups; big or small.

The clean sand then goes up the tall conveyer belt and is collected in big piles, which will be used to restore the shoreline of Fort Myers Beach.

A spokesman with ICS Materials, the company Lee County hired to oversee the operation, said his crews have picked up 80,000 cubic yards of debris.