injection wells

The Sunshine State or the Brownstar State?

With Red Tides Rising, Reefs, Dolphins and Fish Dying, Surfrider Palm Beach Makes a Stink Over Sewage Injection Wells

Red Tide Death Toll. Photo: Florida Marine Research Inst.

By Chris Dixon

In 1997, Tom Warnke founded the Palm Beach chapter of the Surfrider Foundation. Since that time, he has been waging an uphill battle against Florida regulators on an issue that should concern everyone who enjoys the state's nearshore waters. That issue is the pumping of partially treated sewage 1000 feet down into Florida's underground aquifers. Florida regulators claim there is no clear scientific evidence that this sewage is ending up in the surf zone. Yet according to Warnke,some one billion gallons a day from 300 separate wells is being pumped into the Florida ground. -- Additionally, there are over 800 shallow sewage wells dotted all around the Florida Keys. Warnke claims that anecdotal evidence of seeping sewage is everywhere. Dead dolphins, killer algae, horrible sea lice infestations, biblical red-tide outbreaks, sea turtles with horrendous lesions and dying reefs in the Florida Keys. He adds that there is increasing evidence that Florida's porous limestone bedrock is doing little to keep your shit out of your lineup. According to Warnke, Surfrider is going to have some big news on this front in the coming months, but in the meantime, the interview that follows should give you a fair understanding of the issue, and what Surfrider feels is at stake. Is it The Sunshine State or The Brownstar State? Read on…

Lake Worth Pier-Clear and Blue:
Courtesy Surfline

Chris Dixon: Tom, what the hell is an injection well?

Tom Warnke: It's the most expeditious way that Florida uses to treat human sewage. They take partially treated human sewage and inject it into the ground instead of treating it until its clean again.

CD: To what level is it treated?

TW: There's a variety but mostly I'd say it's secondary.

The MSRA Form of Staph Bacteria
A Truly Nasty Beastie Found in Polluted Water

CD: Meaning that it looks fairly clear but still has a lot of nasty microscopic stuff in it.

TW: Right. Most utilities directors would say you can hold it up to a glass and it looks clear. Then you ask them, well, would you drink it? And they say no way. Sometimes it might smell, sometimes it might not. But then at other times that well that pumps the fairly clear water might also pump just terrible brown stuff. There's no monitoring as to what they can pump. In times of heavy rains or heavy volume, they'll just pump stuff down that's hardly treated at all. And there's no requirement for them to report anything. The monitoring is one of the big problems that we've got. A well may be permitted to discharge 20 million gallons a day -- then you find out that they're pumping 80 million a day.

CD: So these sewage plants are pumping truly huge volumes.

TW: Well, the Miami well is permitted to pump 200 million gallons a day. They go a thousand feet deep, sometimes a little deeper. But a thousand feet-- that's like 10 houses down the street. It's not that far down.

The Algae Responsible
for Red Tide.

CD: How is it that sewage plants are allowed to do this?

TW: Well, the state's position is that after you're down into the ground a couple or few hundred feet, there's a confining layer called the Hawthorne layer that keeps the sewage from coming back up. They have to go this deep because they've always been hammered by Sierra and other environmental organizations, saying, you've gotta protect drinking water aquifers. A lot of Florida's drinking water comes from a shallow aquifer which is just a few hundred feet deep. They want to make sure that stuff doesn't come back up into the drinking water. But they don’t have any testing or monitoring, or environmental impact statements to say whether or not the stuff moves laterally. In fact, we've got a lot of good data to show that it does come back up vertically. It percolates right back up through relic sink holes from the ice ages -- and there are just all kinds of underground fracture zones. They can show that there is a confining layer at the site of the well. But theses tests aren't done in the wetlands, or across a wide area. They need to go out in the middle of a sinkhole area and try to find the confining layer -- to see if it covers a truly broad area -- but they don't do that.

A Graphic of the Potential Effects of Sewage Injection Wells.
Click the graphic to see it animated.
Courtesy Surfrider Palm Beach

CD: How did this practice of injecting sewage get started?

TW: They allowed it 20 years ago as a temporary emergency measure to try to do something instead of a horizontal ocean outfall. Now we find out that all it is is just a vertical outfall -- it has the same end results. We call the aquifer the subterranean wetlands. We're trying to protect them but they're just using them as a dumping ground.

CD: What about environmental studies on these wells? Seems like you'd have to do a study to be able to dig one of these wells.

TW: There has never been an Environmental Impact Statement associated with any one of these wells. They might do an EIS for the area immediately around the well, but they've never done a statement to prove that it's not coming out in the ocean or bubbling up in a wetland somewhere. We've got tons and tons of circumstantial evidence that wouldn't prove a case for us, but it's becoming a tidal wave of evidence. We're getting pretty uniform readings of human sewage all over the surf zones of Florida.