It’s towel season on Hilton Head Island.
Beachgoers and turtle activists reported huge piles of resort towels left on the seaside to clutter the surf, stop sea turtles from their tracks and threaten nearby flora and fauna.
Although wildlife activists say they see leftover towels yearly, this year’s piles are catching city officers’ attention.
Recent photos of towels littering the beach have acquired a lot of attention that the Town of Hilton Head Island intervened —saying a remaining week at a public assembly that personnel has contacted general managers from every essential beachfront resort to cast off towel litter.
Towels left at the seaside create risks for human beings and hatch sea turtles. They additionally clutter the island’s maximum frequented appeal.
“It’s no longer a traditional form of litter, but it’s corresponding to that: leaving matters on the seashore that shouldn’t be there,” assistant town supervisor Josh Gruber said Thursday morning.
Gruber confirmed the metropolis team of workers had contacted the Westin Hilton Head Island Resort and Spa, Marriott Hilton Head Resort & Spa, Omni Hilton Head Oceanfront Resort, and Sonesta Resort Hilton Head Island, all of that is oceanfront.
The Turtle Trackers company alternatives up trash and fills in holes on the seashore every night, but some are worried approximately the heaps of water-logged towels.
“I’m inclined to exit each morning and most evenings and choose what travelers don’t pick up, but the towels are simply too large of a task to drag around and get out of the manner,” Sharon Lewis stated Thursday.
Gruber stated it “baffled” him that the accommodations “wouldn’t want to cope with [the issue] themselves” because “that’s cash.” The hotel pool and seashore towels can cost upward of $20,000 every yr, in keeping with Jay Wiendl on the Sonesta Resort.
He said Sonesta became a protected e-mail from metropolis officers to major lodge fashionable managers. Sonesta employs loss prevention officers to sweep the seaside at night for the hotel’s recognizable orange towels.
Wiendl said that visitors have to check towels in and out from the pool area — coverage of the hotel started approximately years ago.
But they can get all of them, and local activists need to peer greater achieved to prevent the piles.
“The town should best the inns, and accommodations ought to charge human beings for taking a towel,” Dale Mathe, a member of the Turtle Trackers corporation in Palmetto Dunes, said Thursday. “It’s less expensive to shop for new towels than to pay someone to exit there and select them. That’s the (inn’s) mindset.”
The town’s tries to reach out to resorts might also have made a distinction. Following the e-mail, Warren Woodard, director of income and marketing for the Omni, stated the motel goes to “double its efforts” and assign personnel to brush the beach once in step with an hour for abandoned towels.
HOW DO TOWELS END UP IN HEAPS ON HILTON HEAD’S BEACH?
Mathe defined that piles of towels are generally leftover from beach condominium chairs, which are rented in partnership with the city, the Shore Beach Service lifeguards, and beachfront inns.
Here’s how it occurs:
In the morning, lifeguards region metropolis-owned apartment chairs and blue umbrellas on the seaside.
Beachgoers rent the chairs thru the lifeguards, not the resorts. When they finish the chairs, they leave the towel on the chair.
At five p.M., Shore Beach lifeguards do away with the apartment chairs from the beaches. They leave the hotel towels in piles for the hotels to easily select.
