Video above: Will Debby circle back to Florida?
TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) – Hurricane Debby brought more than just powerful winds and storm surge before making landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region on Monday – the storm also washed ashore $1 million of cocaine in its wake.
“Hurricane Debby blew 25 packages of cocaine (70 lbs.) onto a beach in the Florida Keys,” Acting Chief Patrol Agent Samuel Briggs II said in a post on X.
The cocaine, which has an estimated street value of over $1 million, was found by a good Samaritan, who contacted authorities, Briggs said.
Border Patrol officials later seized the drugs.
In a matter of hours a number of X users commented – many jokingly – on the Border Patrol’s post, with one person declaring that it was “square grouper season” in the Florida Keys.
It’s not the first time someone walking along a Florida beach has stumbled across a massive amount of cocaine.
In early August of 2022, an estimated $2 million worth of cocaine was discovered inside packages littering the coastline of the Florida Keys.
A year earlier, a wildlife manager with the U.S. Space Force discovered roughly $1.2 million worth of the drug while she was performing a sea turtle nesting survey on a beach near the military branch’s Cape Canaveral base.
Researchers have even performed tests on the potential effect cocaine dumped in the Florida Keys might be having on sharks. The subject of Discovery Channel’s “Cocaine Sharks,” lead scientist Tom Hird, along with partner Tracy Fanara, of the University of Florida, created several experiments to test how sharks would react to faux cocaine bales floating in the water.
“The deeper story here is the way that chemicals, pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs are entering our waterways — entering our oceans — and what effect that they then could go on to have on these delicate ocean ecosystems,” Hird told Live Science.
Hird and Fanara said they embarked on the project after noticing sharks acting strangely – a hammerhead that should have shied away from them swimming off-kilter, directly at them, and a sandbar shark swimming tight circles while appearing to fixate on a non-existent object.