MIAMI BEACH, Fla. – Part of beautiful Miami Beach were left trashed recently, and South Florida students who were skipping school are to blame.
Volunteer clean-up crews who routinely clean all of South Florida’s beaches were shocked and stunned when they saw how those kids left Miami Beach on Tuesday.
What’s more, those kids came back and trashed the beach again, twice in one day.
“I still can’t put it into words,” said Sophie Ringel, founder of Clean Miami Beach. “I am shocked. It’s disgraceful, it’s shameful.”
The shore was completely trashed just before sunset, the aftermath of senior skip day, with videos and photos going viral on social media.
“Unbelievable,” said Ringel. “It’s a slap in the face.”
Photos from earlier in the day show the beach packed from the South Pointe pier to the 2nd Street lifeguard stand.
Many of those people left without bothering to pick up the trash they left behind.
“I honestly cried, I’m not going to lie,” said Maria Algarra, founder of Clean This Beach Up. “Seeing the amount of trash and the kids leaving with no remorse just broke my heart.”
Algarra came out as soon as she got the got call and found a small group of people already picking up trash.
“A couple of them told me, ‘I’m a tourist, I just couldn’t leave this like that,’” she said. “They went to the hotels and asked for trash bags, and I started helping them out.”
Tourists cleaning up our mess.
It took the group of 15 Good Samaritans two and a half hours to pick it all up, but what’s worse is that a couple of those beach goers came back looking for items they left behind, accusing the volunteers of stealing.
“They wanted us to go through all the trash bags, which we did,” said Algarra.
But the story doesn’t end there.
Just minutes later, more than 40 bags of trash were ripped open.
“We left, they came back and destroyed all the bags and threw all the trash on the beach, and no remorse,” Algarra said. “We don’t know who they were.”
Algarra says the police were called but did not respond.
The City of Miami Beach sent Local 10 News photos of the area after it had been cleaned, and say their public work crews did respond and took care of the mess.
Once again on Wednesday the beach was packed with seniors not in class because the SATs were being administered for juniors.
After being shown videos from Tuesday, the ones at the beach Wednesday promised to do better.
We’ll see if they do.
“Stop littering please,” said Ringel. “Treat this as your home, this is your home.”