Dance of the Reptiles (8 page)

By way of elaboration, the DEP says an HU-4 waterway would be considered “splashable”—meaning a splash or two won’t be toxic. You still shouldn’t go in the water, but a few random drops won’t necessarily blister your flesh.

Fun, huh? And I bet you can’t wait to reel in one of those two-headed carp and fry it up for supper.

Things could get seriously interesting on waterways rated HU-5—“boatable,” though unswimmable and unfishable. No human contact would be advised, so forget the shoreline picnic unless you’ve got hazmat suits for the whole family.

DEP insists that a new rating system is necessary because some Florida waterways are misclassified. The agency says it’s unrealistic to expect water in an urban drainage canal, for example, to be as clean as that of an estuary or a natural spring.

But critics such as Linda Young of the Clean Water Network say the proposed Human Use categories could be a gift to polluters, allowing them to continue poisoning waterways at levels hazardous to fish, wildlife, and humans. Instead of cleaning a polluted river to make it safe for all swimming and fishing—as the rules now putatively require—heavy industry
and agriculture will be able to lobby for the more lenient splashable or boatable rating.

Such an option would have been a godsend to the Buckeye pulp mill in Perry, on Florida’s northwest coast. Built in 1952 by Procter & Gamble, the mill dumps 58 million gallons of dioxin-filled waste daily into the Fenholloway River, a foul, lifeless spume that threatens the Gulf of Mexico.

For years, state and federal regulators looked the other way while Young and fellow conservationists tried to make Buckeye stop killing the Fenholloway and restore it to the standards of a Class III waterway.

Buckeye wants to bypass the river and pipe its filth directly into the Gulf, a ludicrous idea approved by the boneheads at DEP. The case remains tangled in court, but Buckeye would have prevailed a long time ago if the Fenholloway were designated anything less than fishable-swimmable.

Under DEP’s draft plan, companies will be able to flush substantially heavier loads of contaminants into HU-4 and HU-5 waterways. The limits haven’t been set, but the long list of acceptable chemicals and compounds include benzene, arsenic, methylene chloride, chloroform, mercury, lead, copper, nickel, PCBs, pesticides, fertilizers, and that yummy old favorite, fecal coliform bacteria.

At a time when pollution threatens virtually every important body of water in Florida—from the St. Johns to Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay—it’s incredible that the state wants to make life easier for the polluters.

Well, not really so incredible.

Just gaggable.

May 13, 2007

Overcrowding? Nature Will Fix That

In the absence of a sane growth-management policy, nature is becoming the great equalizer in Florida.

A 17-month drought has made a puddle of Lake Okeechobee and has parched the Biscayne Aquifer. Parts of the Everglades are drying up, while advancing seawater endangers the well fields that serve hundreds of thousands of residents in Broward and Palm Beach counties.

Water managers warn that, unless consumption is drastically reduced, the taps could run dry—or, at the least, start spitting salt—in several coastal communities. Forget about watering your lawn; you won’t be able to water your kids.

The emergency is so dire that even a busy hurricane season may not make it go away. Florida, one of the wettest states in the country, is running dry.

Drought cycles here are nothing new, but this is the first one to occur with 18 million people encamped on the peninsula. They might cut back on sprinkling their geraniums, but they won’t stop taking showers or washing their laundry.

Not many politicians are brave enough to cite overpopulation as a cause of the current crisis, though it is. There are too many people using too much water, but it’s easier to blame the weather.

The state’s primitive, low-tech economy revolves around cramming as many humans as possible onto every available acre. Few in Tallahassee have the guts to admit that it’s time to change course.

This is where nature steps in. Try selling a new home or a condo when briny crud is dripping from the spigots.

Since its infancy, Florida has had a contentious relationship
with water. The Everglades were diked and dredged to sabotage the natural flow, first for the benefit of agriculture and later for the benefit of land developers. The Everglades promptly began to die, and only when the financial ramifications became manifest did those same special interests rally behind the current restoration program.

Unlike California and other fast-growing states, Florida can’t hijack big rivers to supply its thirsty cities. Much of our water is pumped from porous rock underground, and without moderate rain, the levels keep dropping and salt intrusion progresses.

Once a contaminated well is shut down, it can take years to bring it safely back online. Said Jesus Rodriguez, spokesman for the South Florida Water Management District, “The scenario is a grim one. We could be talking about bottled water for the municipalities for a long time.”

One way to gird for the future—and protect families who already live here—would be to impose building moratoriums in those counties where the water shortage is most acute.

This is way too simple and sensible. Moratoriums can’t be enacted unless local leaders are willing to stand up to developers, a rare occurrence indeed. The state is requiring counties to recycle water for nonpotable uses, but that doesn’t curb the liquid appetite of sprawl.

It’s lunacy to continue carving out subdivisions and erecting high-rises when the wells are drying up, but that’s the plan: Keep Florida growing, no matter what. Once the rainy season begins, everything’s gonna be fine, right?

Wrong. The state was soaked by hurricanes and tropical waves during 2004 and 2005, yet where’s all that water now?

As we all know, newcomers aren’t easily spooked away from Florida. Despite predictions of another terrible storm season, the state’s population soared last year by nearly
431,000. That’s the same as adding two more cities, each the size of Orlando.

According to the University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research, the state will have 20 million residents within three years and almost 25 million by 2025.

Don’t let anybody tell you this is good news, unless you yearn for more taxes, higher insurance rates, and water bills as hefty as your car payment. That’s the future, and it’s not so far off.

Rains will come this summer, as they always do, providing temporary cover for politicians who don’t want to confront the water crisis. Experts say it could take years of heavier than normal precipitation to restore safe levels in Lake Okeechobee and saturate the aquifers sufficiently to stave off encroaching seawater.

Shortages will hit some communities sooner, and harder, than others. Eventually, state water managers will be forced to take action on a bolder scale than rationing sprinkler use.

Twice as many people are moving here as are moving out. The net population continues to expand at the dangerous rate of about 1,000 souls a day, and they’ll keep coming until there’s a full-blown water panic.

By then, we’ll all be sucking air.

March 8, 2009

Public Spigot Stays Open for Water Bottlers

You probably thought there was a serious water shortage in Florida.

It’s why we’re spending billions to repair and repurify the Everglades, right? It’s why we’re not supposed to run our lawn sprinklers more than once or twice a week.

But hold on. It turns out there’s a boundless, virtually free
supply of Florida water—though not for residents. The public spigot remains open day and night for Nestlé, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and 19 other corporations that bottle our water and sell it for a huge per-unit profit.

The stuff is no safer or tastier than most municipal tap water, but lots of us buy it anyway. You know all the brands: Deer Park, Dasani, Zephyrhills, Aquafina, even Publix. Common sense would suggest that a company with a balance sheet like Coca-Cola’s or Pepsi’s ought to pay for the water they take, the same as homeowners and small businesses do.

Nope. Every year, state water managers allow large bottling firms to siphon nearly two
billion
gallons from fresh springs and aquifers. The fees are laughably puny.

For example, it cost Nestlé Waters of North America the grand sum of $150 for a permit to remove as much water as it pleases from the Blue Springs in Madison County. Every day, Nestlé pipes about 500,000 gallons, enough to fill 102,000 plastic bottles that are then shipped to stores and supermarkets throughout the Southeast. Even by Florida standards, the scale of this public rip-off is mind-bending.

Protected by lawmakers, the bottling companies get a free ride—more precisely, a free guzzle of about 5.4 million gallons a day. Up until December, the Department of Environmental Protection kept no data on water-bottling operations and, of course, imposed no regulation.

Three years ago, House Democrats sought a fee on bottled-water producers, but the bill was quietly drowned by Republicans in the Senate. Vermont and Michigan have already passed such a measure, and Maine is currently considering it.

Now the issue is floating up again in that dreary annual IQ test otherwise known as the meeting of the Florida Legislature.
Gov. Charlie Crist is pushing for a modest 6-cents-per-gallon tax on water taken by commercial bottlers.

The governor’s office calls it a “severance fee” that would treat water like phosphate, oil, and other natural resources extracted by private companies. Crist predicts the tax would raise $56 million the first year, much-needed funds that could be used for projects like desalinization plants.

Crist’s fee would also apply to water purchased by bottling companies from municipal supplies—basically tap water. Though bottlers don’t advertise it, some of the water they sell with fancy labels comes from the same treatment tanks as the stuff from your kitchen faucet, only it’s outrageously more expensive.

Perceptively noting that the budget is in shambles and the state is desperate for revenue, even some Republicans have expressed support for cashing in on the bottled-water craze. In a charming understatement, Sen. Evelyn Lynn of Ormond Beach said “it’s somewhat of a contradiction” for Florida to let bottling firms have all the water they want while curtailing use by homeowners.

However, Lynn wants to tax water bottles at the point of sale, meaning the money would come from the pockets of consumers. Crist’s proposed fee is fairer, laying the burden where it belongs—on the companies that are getting rich from tapping Florida’s underground aquifers.

Not surprisingly, the industry greatly prefers a sales tax over an extraction fee. Its lobbyists are fiercely working to kill the governor’s plan. Bottlers say it’s wrong to single out one group among the many private and public users of spring water. Although agriculture does draw billions of gallons from the same sources, few ranches or farms enjoy the spectacular profits that water bottlers do.

The times are jittery for corporations such as Nestlé and Coca-Cola, under fire for contributing a waste stream of plastic containers to the nation’s landfills and dumps.

It also appears that consumers are starting to figure out what experts have long asserted—that bottled water is no bargain, and no better for your health than what comes from the tap. Nestlé’s sales of its water brands dropped about 1.6 percent in 2008.

Don’t worry, though. Those companies that use Florida springs are still mopping up. It’s easy when you don’t have to pay for your product.

Next time you open your family’s water bill, think about that little bottle of Zephyrhills that you bought for $1.69. How does it taste now?

December 12, 2010

Florida Fights for Rights of Polluters

Farms, mills, and municipalities that use Florida waterways as a latrine got more good news last week from their stooges in Tallahassee. The latest battle to stop the enforcement of federal pollution laws will be funded by state taxpayers.

Outgoing Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson—backed by Attorney General Bill McCollum—has sued to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from imposing revised clean-water standards for Florida’s rivers, creeks, and lakes.

Standing stoically in support of the polluters, McCollum and Bronson say the new water rules are too costly and based on flawed science (interestingly, data provided by the state itself). Endorsing that lame position are their successors, Attorney General–elect Pam Bondi and Agriculture Commissioner–elect Adam Putnam.

To hear all this whining, you’d think the EPA had ambushed Florida businesses with the new water regulations. Not even close. Back in 1998, the EPA ordered all states to cut back pollution of so-called surface waters with damaging nutrients from farms, ranches, septic tanks, and sewage-treatment facilities. The agency set a deadline of 2004 and then—in the anti-regulatory spirit of the Bush era—basically did nothing to follow up. In 2008, environmental groups finally sued the EPA in order to compel enforcement of the federal Clean Water Act.

It’s not some new piece of radical legislation. It was born in 1948 as the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, and expanded significantly under Richard Nixon in 1972, and again in 1977.

Floridians who aren’t familiar with the Clean Water Act can be forgiven, because it has never been taken seriously here by companies that dump massive volumes of waste into public waters, or by the politicians who are supposed to care about such crimes.

The Everglades wouldn’t be in its current dire condition if authorities at all levels hadn’t skirted and even ignored the law, permitting ranchers, sugar farmers, and developing cities to flush billions of dirty gallons of runoff into the state’s most important watershed.

With good reason, after decades of getting their way, polluters became cocky and complacent. But they’re not stupid, and the writing has been on the wall for some time. The EPA has worked with the administrations of both Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist to come up with new water rules, often bowing to industry concerns.