Related: Hurricane adds to heaps of trouble for sea turtle babies
By Steve Plunkett
Gulf Stream town officials will continue their attempt to persuade residents who live on the oceanfront to shield their home’s lights from the beach and to use sea turtle-friendly red or amber light bulbs.
The effort in part is also to keep Gulf Stream from being required to adopt Palm Beach County’s more restrictive rules for lighting on the beach, which are designed to prevent sea turtle hatchlings from becoming disoriented.
Gulf Stream has its own turtle protection ordinance so that the county cannot cite its residents.
“Our ordinance is one of encouragement. We don’t go into people’s homes and tell them what to do with their lighting,” Mayor Scott Morgan said at the Town Commission’s Aug. 8 meeting.
Commissioner Joan Orthwein said an acquaintance who lives in a fourth-floor unit in Ocean Ridge kept her bathroom light on and was ordered by the county to keep her shutters closed during turtle nesting season.
“I’m just telling what happened. It’s true,” she said.
Town Clerk Renee Basel told commissioners she had toured turtle nests the night before with Sea Turtle Adventures, which monitors nests on the town’s beach.
“She showed me the tracks of the turtles, and they were going north and south, not east and west. She said that’s what disorients them is these lights,” Basel said. The artificial lighting may attract hatchlings, causing them to crawl away from — instead of into — the ocean.
After receiving photos of Gulf Stream homes with lights visible from the beach, Basel began calling the owners asking them to turn down or turn off their lights at a certain time, or to put them on timers. Most of them “are not even here,” the mayor said.
“I haven’t gotten through all of them, but right now they’ve been about half and half,” she said. “A lot of them didn’t even know their lights were on.”
But a couple of owners said they were not going to change their lighting for security reasons. The mayor planned to meet with them to possibly persuade them to do something.
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