Coffee spill: Thousands of coffee cans wash up in Indialantic

Chris Sybo stepped out of the Doubletree Hotel for a quick early morning walk along the beach when he spotted a coffee lover's dream: hundreds of sealed, yellow cans of coffee dotting the sand and seaweed for at least a mile.

"It was just filled with it," said Sybo, visiting the area from Pittsburgh to attend his daughter's graduation at Florida Institute of Technology.

"I came out early this morning and saw it. I went back and told a worker and said you ought to see the beach. It's like Christmas coffee," he said as more than a dozen beachcombers for about a mile scooped up the sand-covered cans and stuffed them into bags.

The coffee — possibly from a missing load of containers that fell overboard from a barge over the weekend — washed up along the shore in Indialantic overnight, dotting the beaches sandwiching either side of the Doubletree Hotel, 1665 State Road A1A.

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Brevard County sheriff’s deputies and Indialantic police were called to the area near the hotel after the initial reports of the cans turning up in the surf were made around sunrise. Two investigators with the U.S. Coast Guard were also walking the beach, assessing the scene. "We're checking to make sure it's nothing else but coffee," said Elvin Rodriguez, a marine science technician with the Coast Guard. "This is very unusual," he said, adding that likely, the cargo ship owner could be responsible for the coffee spill.

Residents from the nearby area, however, weren't waiting. Some came back from the beach with trash bags packed with the recovered coffee cans. One man had two trash bags. Still, hundreds of the yellow, 10-ounce cans of Cafe Bustelo coffee and other small, vacuum packed bricks of coffee lined the shore. More was washing ashore.

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“I was out there about a half hour ago. There must be thousands cans or packages of compressed coffee,” said Leon Stein of Indialantic. He took photos of the sight.

“These containers all seem to be sealed. We live right on the ocean. We routinely walk the beach with bags but this is thousands of containers. It looks usable.”

Late Monday, the U.S. Coast Guard issued a safety warning to boaters along the coast off Brevard after at least 25 shipping containers fell off a vessel bound for Puerto Rico, including several that may have contained hazardous materials, including batteries. It was not immediately known what was in the other containers that went missing.

The broadcast was aired to warn area boaters and other vessels to be on the alert for the containers.

Contact Gallop at 321-242-2642, jdgallop@floridatoday.com, and Twitter@JDGallop

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