BREVARD COUNTY, Fla. — A team of community leaders continues its work to help the struggling Indian River Lagoon. Statewide, 289 manatees have died in the first six months of this year, including sixteen in Brevard County.

Decades of pollution have resulted in harmful algae blooms and dying manatees.

The animals’ plight unfortunately takes center stage in efforts to restore the lagoon back to health.

The Citizen Oversight Committee of the Save Our Indian River Lagoon Program meets monthly to put their heads together on ways to help the waterway.

During their meeting on May 19, the focus was on manatees and the sharp decline of seagrass, their primary food source.

Stel Bailey is an environmental health activist and she brought her children, 14-year-old Connor, and 9-year-old Colleen, to the meeting.

“I want their generation to have a better chance to be able to see what I saw growing up on the lagoon, to see a thriving ecosystem, not where we are having to report distressed manatees,” Bailey said.

Doug Scheidt, an ecologist who contracts with the Kennedy Space Center, showed examples of the plight of manatees in a presentation.

“Aerial surveys started in the late 70s and started in the early 80s as part of long term ecological monitoring at the Kennedy Space Center,” Scheidt said to the group.

Those surveys showed the effects of the super algae bloom in 2011.

In 2009, sea grass was plentiful in the survey area spanning from Port Canaveral north to the KSC launch pads.

Fast forward to 2017 and the manatee count went down drastically when 12,000 acres, or 95 percent, died off.

Scheidt says if anyone took all of that sea grass, ripped it up into 36-foot-wide strips about the width of I-95, lay them end-to-end up to Jacksonville, then turned left, it would stretch all the way to Los Angeles.

“That’s how much sea grass was lost in just this area,” he said.

Bailey says manatee deaths put the spotlight on saving the lagoon.

“I think the manatees have paved the way for us to take aggressive action,” she said.

The latest survey shows 5,733 manatees in Florida.

Brevard County is more than halfway through a 10-year plan funding project to remove one million pounds of excess nitrogen from the lagoon each year.