Bad Water

Water stewards and clean water champions in the Sunshine State may now feel both pride and dismay.

Pride because Florida ranks far ahead of most other states in determining whether its fresh water is clean enough for swimming use, the all-purposes standard established 52 years ago by the 1972 federal Clean Water Act for “primary contact water recreation.”

Dismay, because much of it isn’t, according to data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the state Department of Environmental Protection and a private company that arranges guided hunting and fishing trips throughout the United States and outside our borders, Captain Experiences.

That company analyzed the federal and state data along with numbers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and released a recent report that pointed to these facts: Each year, on average, about 35,000 cases of waterborne illness occur in the United States.

Although the Clean Water Act requires every state to assess 100% of its recreational-use waters for impairment by industrial waste, sewage or agricultural runoff, only 19 states have assessed even 50% of their lakes and rivers.

Researchers take samples of algae from both fresh water and saltwater sources throughout the state, capturing and studying them to determine how to combat the growing problem. COURTESY PHOTO

Florida, happily, has assessed 95.1% of its lakes, reservoirs, ponds and wetlands used for swimming, boating and fishing, and 60.9% of its creeks, rivers and streams.

Unhappily, 75.1% of Florida’s lakes, reservoirs, ponds and wetlands rated too polluted for swimming, and almost half — 49% — of the Sunshine State’s rivers and streams, or at least those waters assessed for impairment.

The full analysis can be found at this link: captainexperiences.com/blog/ states-that-you-should-think-twiceabout swimming-in

The data represents a sweeping failure of states to follow federal law and curtail or stop sources of pollution in fresh water, a failure long recognized that became comprehensively apparent in a study using state data first released two years ago on the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act.

When fresh water is clean, says Matt DePaolis, salt water usually looks like this.

In total acreage of fresh water — lakes, reservoirs, ponds and wetlands that don’t move — Florida ranked no. 1 among the states for most polluted lakes and streams. And it ranked no. 2 for most polluted estuaries (rivers, streams and creeks).

This year, say a chorus of voices working to end our fresh water dilemma, little has changed except the legislature’s grant of $25 million to the Water School at Florida Gulf Coast University to study the sources of pollution, and another $2 million to study Lake Okeechobee. Again.

“Studying these problems ad nauseam will not change the fact that we are not properly regulating polluters in the state of Florida,” says Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, in Stuart. “Until we do that, we won’t see meaningful progress in cleaning up our waterways.”

In a press release, Captain Experiences put it this way: “the Clean Water Act (CWA) has fallen short of its goal to make 100% of U.S. waters “fishable and swimmable,” in large part due to inefficient and insufficient water quality monitoring: Under the CWA, each state is supposed to assess all of its recreational-use lakes and rivers for impairments.”

“It helps to do both,” Ms. Samples adds — both study and regulate — “and a lot of money is flowing for studies and dirt-moving restoration projects, but it will be wasted if we’re not stopping the origin of the illness. In the case of Okeechobee, that comes largely from ag sources, and pollution from urban and suburban development. So rein in the biggest polluters and enforce regulations responsibly.”

And now, the water champions say, the broadest expanse of very dirty fresh water in the United States — Lake Okeechobee, the nation’s second largest by surface area at 730 square miles — is vulnerable again to overwhelming rains, just as it is every year.

At the beginning of August levels in the lake were about average, at 13.9 feet.

SAMPLES

And just as they have done and would do again every year, if Okeechobee levels climb to 16 feet and above, the Army Corps of Engineers would release destructive quantities of polluted water west down the 60-mile Caloosahatchee River basin to Charlotte Harbor and the Gulf of Mexico, and east down the St. Lucie into the southern terminus of the 136-mile long Indian River Lagoon at Stuart.

Those releases carry so much legacy pollution from agricultural fields, primarily phosphorous and nitrogen, combined with current agricultural pollution from ranches and farms north of the lake that fresh, brackish and saltwater marine environments all can become mortally imperiled. All of it joins runoff from agricultural operations and septic-system communities along with the suburban and urban communities where fertilized lawns remain popular and water treatment systems sometimes malfunction.

While that’s not new news, the water champions say the fact that little progress has been made in changing the statistics since 2022 and for years before that has created a new sense of dismay, followed by a new sense of purpose.

LOMBERK

“In my view, we set ourselves up for failure with Basin Management Action Plans (BMAPS) in a way likely not to have success,” says Jim Moir, the Indian Riverkeeper, part of the non-profit Waterkeeper Alliance of 15 member organizations in the state. “There’s also no accountability of the regulations. So, this triangular finger-pointing goes on between the Water Management Districts, the Department of Environmental Protection and the Department of Agriculture as to whose fault it is — and then on top of that, the local municipalities responsible for wastewater treatment.”

The Waterkeepers appear to be of one accord: Pollution of Florida fresh water can’t be significantly reduced if it isn’t stopped at the source. And, they suggest, we have known the sources for years, despite new legislative grants from this year’s state budget that suggest otherwise.

DEPAOLIS

“In one conversation we’re having internally, we’ve decided it’s incumbent on us to step in and do the work the state is not willing or able to do — especially in looking at the sources faster,” says Jen Lomberk, who serves both as the Matanzas Riverkeeper in the northern part of the state, and as the executive director of the Waterkeepers Alliance in Florida.

Although waters in each region of the state may face slightly different challenges, “the trends haven’t changed at all since the study came out — impaired for pollution in Florida means nutrient pollution, we know that,” says Matt DePaolis, environmental policy director for the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation.

“And we know where they come from. We’re adding them from agriculture, from stormwater runoff, from septic systems including those below sea level — nutrients that come from lawns, from nutrient fertilizer,” DePaolis says. “They’re applied because they make plants grow better. But they do the same thing once they hit water — make plants grow better. And the plants most ready to uptake those nutrients tend to be algae. Plants we don’t necessarily want to thrive in our water systems.”

SMART

The fear and threat to many residents of nearby waterways, to business owners and to farmers and commercial fishermen and women is cyanobacteria in the fresh water and massive expansions of red tide in salt.

The problems can exist across the state.

“In our springs and spring-fed rivers, the Department of Environmental Protection found that 80% of those were impaired by excessive nitrogen, and the sources of pollution are known,” says Ryan Smart, executive director of the Florida Springs Council. “It’s pri- marily ag. Of our Outstanding Florida Springs, the dominant source is agriculture — that’s for more than 50%, and it’s just for the springs, most on our land north of Interstate 4.”

A higher altitude view of the Caloosahatchee River. COURTESY PHOTO

Septic and urban runoff are also problems, he says.

“The single biggest source is farm fertilizer — not only are we not making progress, but initiatives by the University of Florida’s IFAS and the state Department of Agriculture to increase the amount of fertilizer farmers are putting down make our water quality even worse,” Smart says. “It’s not rocket science, it’s just about political will and the money to make it all work.”

The way forward

There are things we can do, Smart says — and he’s not the only one who sees a path to a better future for fresh water.

“We have to do something to address the problem of ag pollution and we have to work with farmers to convert ag land back to forest in some places — and that would mean making sure money is available to pay farmers for the eco-services they’re providing,” he says.

And, he adds, we could be using our money a lot more efficiently.

“The vast majority of money goes to sometimes not very effective infrastructure: septic upgrades, alternative water supply projects, water treatment. You find those are very economically inefficient,” Smart adds. “We know now that it costs the state $2,000 to remove one pound of nitrogen from fresh water (with upgraded water treatment infrastructure).”

But when the state uses the money to help farmers convert their land and its uses, “they could get the same reduction (a pound of nitrogen) at one-tenth of the cost.”

His conclusion: “We have to change the way we use land in Florida — find a way to de-intensify in Florida.”

DePaolis suggests every individual can contribute to the someday solution.

“Individual decisions can be made that benefit fresh water. As a personal homeowner, it matters more than you realize if you choose to put native plants that don’t need a lot of water around you,” he said. “So all of these compounding things are contributing to pollution in the watershed.

“But it won’t be solved just by individual decision-making. We also need better tools, whether that’s paying farmers to take some land out of production so it’s being restored; or evaluating our fertilizer use to see if it’s matching our needs for harvest, and the needs of the state overall,” DePaolis adds.

There’s an example: When sugar farmers weren’t getting as much water as they thought they needed for a full yield, the reduction in water supply turned out not to matter — “the yields didn’t take a hit at all,” he says.

Like Ryan Smart, though, he adds this thought: “Anything we can do to increase the restoration of historic lands taken away to be utilized for agriculture will be a great boon overall.”

The post Bad Water first appeared on Palm Beach Florida Weekly .