Preserving paradise: protecting our water quality

There’s a local effort underway to protect what many believe is our most precious resource: our water.

On Tuesday, local business leaders joined with environmental stewards to learn how water quality fuels or harms our economic engine.

WINK News tagged along for a day in the Gulf.

Captain Nelson Diaz has been a fishing guide for 25 years. All his life, he’s known this was the plan.

Captains like Diaz are at the front of the fight for clean water. They see and feel the impacts immediately.

“Water quality is the biggest thing here. If we don’t have the water quality, we’re not obviously going to be catching fish like this, and we aren’t going to be seeing the wildlife,” Diaz said.

Kyle Decicco, president and CEO of Sanibel Captiva Community Bank, told us that water quality is just as important as net interest margins.

The Sanibel Captiva Community Bank is an industry far removed from the water, but when problems arise, the bank feels the impact because customers start calling.

“They say to us, ‘My business just stopped. It fell off a cliff. People aren’t coming into our hotel rooms. People aren’t coming into our restaurants,'” Decicco said.

2018’s blue-green algae and red tide hurt businesses with no safety net.

“It’s not like a hurricane or a named storm where there’s insurance for that; there’s no insurance for these water quality issues,” Decicco said.

The water impacts everyone, which is why local leaders, business owners, fishing guides and environmental stewards come together in a common fight to preserve paradise.