SOUTH BETHANY, Del. - Karen and Jeff Marshall live on the canal in South Bethany love it, but in the spring Karen says "The Reaper" comes.
"Then it starts to smell, it smells like sulfur and it's not just the smell, it burns your eyes when you walk outside. You can't open your windows in your house because of the stench, it's just horrible."
The town of South Bethany has an algae problem and locals like Gary Nowell say it wasn't always that way. "We first came down here in the late 60s. There was there was no algae to deal with."
Algae not only can hurt marine life but it can get caught up in boat engines on the canals and cause them to overheat and sometimes break. But some like Stephen Goss have experienced the effects of algae build up himself.
"We pretty much couldn't go down the canals at all. It was it was completely caked with algae blooms. With a kayak in the water, you're literally coming out with 10 to 15 pounds of full green mashed up material. So yeah, it was extremely bad during the hot months of the year."
Although DNREC does yearly cleanups, the town says they aren't as efficient due to broken equipment and staffing, so they've set aside $50,000 to pay an outside company to clean the canals.
This is a relief to Karen Marshall, but she has one big question: "Where are you going to put the stuff? You know once once you harvest this stuff, it has to go somewhere. Where's it going to go?"
South Bethany is still waiting for its Parks and Rec department to give them approval to use their dumping site once the algae is cleaned from the canals.