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| Sewage Seas of Florida |
Florida, popular travel destination for those seeking pristine waters, hides a secret in its ocean. Every day, three counties pump 300 million gallons of partially treated urban wastewater, too polluted to even be used for lawn watering, into the clear waters.
Dating back to the 1940s, the dumping has recently begun to be noticed as beach closings become more commonplace due to unsafe bacteria levels. Red tides, blankets of potentially toxic algae, have also begun rolling in. "The whole idea of it just kind of makes me sick," Ed Tedtmann, a scuba diver and Sierra Club activist who no longer swims off of his home in Boynton Beach, Florida, told the Cyber Diver News Network.
The counties of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach are the culprits. Six sewage outfall pipes stretch from one to 3.5 miles offshore and release their waste at a depth of 100 feet. State officials claim that the waste dissipates at sea and cause almost no pollution because it is carried away by the Gulfstream current.
"The human health risks are low because of the dilution involved, and the outfall discharges are disinfected," Janet Llewellyn, head of water resource management for the Florida Departmnet of Environmental Protection, told CDNN.
Marine scientists, however, believe that the minimally treated effluent is potentially harmful to small children, the elderly and those with compromised immune systems as well as to the ecosystem. High levels of nitrogen and ammonia in the waste create algae blooms that suffocate coral reefs.
"The state has been reluctant to admit that these discharges are affecting the reefs," Peter Barile, a scientist at Marine Research and Consulting, told CDNN. "We've had very, very strong evidence but, amazingly, a reluctance by the state to admit this."
Money, of course, is the reason for the reluctance. Waste-water treatment is expensive, especially upgrading the aging plants in Florida. "We are literally hundreds of billions of dollars behind in taking care of our waste-water treatment systems," Nancy Stoner, director of the Clean Water Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council, says.
Until the funding is there, states like Florida and California will continue to belch waste into the seas, endangering wildlife below water and human life above it.
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