It was a shock for residents of Flint, Michigan. The water supply on which they depend was found to be contaminated with lead, a substance known to cause behavior and psychological problems (or worse) in those who consume it.
Thousands of families, including children, were put at risk for some very serious health problems, all because officials wanted to save money.
The population in Flint is still reeling from the incident, which apparently resulted from a state-appointed official’s call to switch to a cheaper water source without requiring adequate treatment protocols.
In the Tampa Bay area and statewide, the likelihood of that scenario playing out is low (for now). The state’s drinking water is delivered to residents’ faucets in a way that’s very different from the journey it takes in Michigan.
Even so, for public officials overseeing the population’s water supply, what happened in Flint is a cautionary tale.
“It’s an important lesson to learn from, that we can never get too comfortable and… take our eyes off the ball,” said St. Petersburg City Councilwoman Darden Rice. “They made some pretty critical, fundamental errors… caused by budget decisions and by very little oversight.”
The Tampa Bay area, including St. Petersburg, gets its water from Tampa Bay Water, a regional entity that uses a combination of groundwater from a porous limestone aquifer dubbed the Floridan that underlies much of the state; surface water from rivers that include the Hillsborough; and desalinated seawater to provide millions of people with clean, safe drinking water.
According to the supplier, no other water provider in the country uses that combination of resources. Groundwater was once the sole source, but in 2002 TBW added surface water, and several years later the desalination plant came online.
But the area’s water supply still consists largely — some 66 percent — of groundwater taken from wells.
Using about 120 criteria to test water quality, TBW, Southwest Florida Water Management District (Swiftmud) and other agencies conduct over 60,000 tests on samples taken from 500 sites each year. The tests look for everything from naturally occurring coliform bacteria to lead from corroding pipes.
Cities and counties also treat water from that supply for safety, taste and color, and they each add fluoride.
Municipalities test their water thousands of times per year to ensure safety. There is always a small chance of lead seepage, given that some water is being delivered via plumbing, but chances are slim and water managers say those who suspect the substance may be in their water should call to have it tested. Any trace amount coming from equipment, though, is scant compared to the amount present in Flint’s supply.
“I don’t want to sound breezy about it, but I think that we have much better controls here,” Rice said. “We’re lucky that, for the most part, people can pretty much turn on the water faucet in the kitchen sink reliably every day and don’t have to worry about it.”
But that may soon change, say environmentalists, as a number of factors threaten our region’s water resources.
Tapping too much
It’s not likely that very many people think to turn off the faucet while soaping up in the shower or brushing their teeth, and few probably think twice when they see a sprinkler system going full blast in the rain.
Most people probably don’t think too much about where the water’s coming from, either. They simply picture the diagrams we were shown in grade school depicting the water cycle as something in which the water being consumed is replenished at the same rate through rain.
And in Florida, it can get pretty rainy.
So we wash our clothes and flush our toilets with potable water when we could be using water from rain cisterns. Even worse, we water our lawns and golf courses with it.
“In other words, We take our drinking water and pour it into the ground,” said Kent Bailey, chair of the Tampa Bay Sierra Club. “Which is totally dumb.”
The result?
Dwindling water levels in the once-rich aquifer that feeds our rivers and streams.
“In Hillsborough County we have pulled down the historic levels of our aquifer 25 feet — around 23, 25 feet below where it normally would be,” Bailey said.
Which can cause some of that porous limestone to cave in, leading to a familiar — and often terrifying — phenomenon in the region: sinkholes.
Another key consequence of that, especially as sea levels creep upward, is the movement of ocean water into the porous aquifer, which contaminates the underground freshwater supply. Bailey said there’s been seawater detected in the aquifer as far inland as Brandon.
“When you hear about sinkholes in particular, and saltwater intrusion, this is because the aquifer in Hillsborough County is much lower than it ought to be.”
Sure, desalination is something of a fix, but it can really only be used residentially and commercially, not in Hillsborough
County’s (and Florida’s) ever-important agricultural operations.
“We can drink desalinated water, but we can’t grow strawberries or tomatoes on desalinated water,” Bailey said.
“Agriculture is critical to the economy of Central Florida and Hillsborough County, and we have locked ourselves into a scenario where wells far inland are going to be polluted with saltwater in the foreseeable future.”
At the individual level, water managers recommend minding individual water use in ways that include those mentioned above as well as using “Florida-friendly” landscaping, which eschews lush and totally unsustainable grass for native plants with water needs that largely match local weather patterns.
No fracking way
Much in the way that Flint’s crisis stemmed from a cost-saving measure sought by leaders who also supported a relaxed approach to environmental controls, Florida’s political leadership has largely acted in ways that, while they are friendly to industries and may at first save taxpayers money, could be detrimental to water sources locally and statewide.
Take hydraulic fracturing, a process commonly referred to as fracking.
State lawmakers are currently trying to legalize and regulate it via a measure that would at the same time protect companies from having to disclose the chemicals they use and bar cities from passing local bans on the process.
Fracking is a process that involves using water and caustic chemicals (which could include mercury, methanol, radium or hydrochloric acid) to break apart subterranean rock and extract oil or gas that lies beneath.
Not only does the process use an incredible amount of water (up to 8 million gallons per fracturing), but the compounds it uses, with ingredient lists that wouldn’t have to be disclosed to the public, can seep into the ground and surface water, or contaminate the public water supply.
“We know that fracking cannot be done or regulated safely, period,” said Jennifer Rubiello, director of of Environment Florida. “There have been countless examples across the country that show that it can’t be regulated safely and so we should ban it.”
While it doesn’t appear likely it’ll take place near Tampa Bay’s regional water resources, it could happen in the Panhandle and southwest Florida.
On the surface
While water from rivers, lakes and streams constitutes just over a third of Tampa Bay’s water supply, the depletion of groundwater might cause us to rely even more on surface water.
Currently, key regional surface water sources include the Tampa Bypass Canal as well as the Hillsborough and Alafia rivers, which run through rural and urban areas before getting collected in the 15.5 billion-gallon C.W. Bill Young Reservoir in eastern Hillsborough.
There’s always the risk of stormwater, urban and agricultural runoff, but testing and treatment at the local level as well as federal Clean Water Act restrictions on industrial pollution in major waterways reduce the risk.
Not so for smaller rivers and streams that might be tributaries to those larger rivers.
Florida is currently suing the federal government over a recent expansion of the Clean Water Act that extends protections to smaller waterways (protections that had been in place until the George W. Bush administration rolled them back).
Without those protections, environmental advocates warn, those waterways are vulnerable to industrial pollution that could affect water resources down the road. An oft-cited example of this is Koch Industries-owned Buckeye Florida, a pulp plant that allegedly dumped more than 264,000 gallons of industrial waste into the Steinhatchee and Econfina rivers in 2012.
Rubiello said lead contamination in Flint is “an alarming reminder that at the very least, we need strong state and federal limits on the amount of pollution that’s being dumped into our streams. Particularly, if we want clean water in our region, in Tampa Bay, we need to make sure that we’re keeping toxic pollutants out of the smaller streams and wetlands that supply the drinking water for a third of the state.”
The pipeline
At the intersection of Lake, Pasco, Polk and Sumter counties, there’s a verdant area known as the Green Swamp region, comprising some 560,000 acres. Swiftmud manages much of the area. Because of its slightly higher elevation, rainwater that gathers there forms the headwaters of the Hillsborough, Ocklawaha, Peace and Withlacooche rivers and serves as a recharge site for the ever-important Floridan Aquifer, according to Swiftmud.
But the Sierra Club’s Kent Bailey said a proposed underground natural gas pipeline slated to run through the area, the Sabal Trail Transmission, may pose a threat. A 500-mile pipeline stretching from Alabama to Central Florida, it would be capable of transmitting up to 1 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day.
It’s not the pipeline itself that could threaten critical water sources, he said, but potential damage that could occur during its construction.
He said he hopes Florida’s environmental lobby can stop the pipeline, not just because of potential damage to Green Swamp, but also to curb harmful carbon emissions stemming from fossil fuel use.
“We’re hopeful that we can prevent the Sabal Trail Pipeline from going through,” Bailey said. “We need to be turning away from fossil fuels and embracing solar energy.”