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Sewer pipes in sea finally raise a stink
Posted on Tue, Apr. 01, 2008
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BY FRED GRIMM
[email protected]
Coral reefs are dying. Sea grass meadows are receding. Fisheries are depleted. Health officials periodically close our beaches, citing unacceptable levels of fecal bacteria.
Algae plumes surround South Florida's sewage outfall pipes. Yet we've long clung to the delusion that these unhappy developments have nothing to do with a daily deluge of 300 million gallons of sewage (called ''lightly treated'' in polite company) that we spew into the ocean.
Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties pump the stuff, with grotesque levels of ammonium, into pipes protruding no more than three miles offshore.
We've been doing it for decades, still relying on the 1982 assessment from an EPA official. No use spending all that money. ``You can just put that stuff in the ocean and, zip, it's gone.''
And zip. It was gone. Unless the wind blew east.
Brian LaPointe, a scientist with Florida Atlantic University's Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, has long fought the assumption that the nutrients pouring out of the sewage outfall pipes would be carried away by the Gulf Stream. He has been collecting the data for more than two decades that show easterly winds carry the effluent back toward the beaches.
POISONING NATURE
LaPointe's research also indicates that the cumulative effect, over the years, has poisoned the coral reefs and sea grasses. Fishermen have long been blamed for the declining fisheries, but LaPointe thinks our own waste has been the culprit, wiping out the offshore habitat.
LaPointe's findings aren't likely to shock you. Any elementary school kid, told that we're dumping 300 million gallons of sewage a day into the ocean, would wrinkle his nose in disgust.
Back in 1982, Fort Lauderdale Mayor Robert Dressler warned against outfall pipes: ``The ocean is our most important asset. Dumping treated sewage into the ocean would be a big mistake.''
But common sense was flushed out with the sewage. Real waste treatment not only would have been costly, but it would have the effect of limiting South Florida's insane rate of development.
LaPointe thinks the real scandal here lies with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which embraced lousy science to license sewage outfall pipes.
LaPointe's sense that economic interests trump science comes from how officialdom largely ignored his findings that nutrients flowing out of the sugar cane fields were destroying Florida Bay.
RADICAL IDEA
The prevailing view, in the 1990s, was that the bay suffered from too much salinity. Huge amounts of untreated, nitrogen-laden agricultural water was allowed to flow down the Everglades and into the bay. To disastrous effects.
Over the past six years, the national and international scientific consensus has come round to embrace LaPointe's findings. Redemption, he noted dryly, comes a little late for Florida Bay.
But maybe it's not too late to jettison sewer outfall pipes. A promising bill wending its way through the state Senate would require South Florida to stop pumping sewage into the ocean by 2018.
Maybe the impetus is good science. But LaPointe suspects, instead, the political support has more to do with our crippling water shortage. Those 300 millions of gallons of water now represents a valuable commodity. Treated wastewater could save lawns and golf courses and carwashes.
Suddenly water -- even sewage water -- is worth money. In South Florida, saving the coral reefs is a nice thought, but money talks.
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