injection wells

CD: You've got very deep water between the Florida coast and the Bahamas -- like 4000 feet. How do they know that it doesn't leach laterally into the ocean here along the continental shelf if they're only pumping it down a thousand feet?

TW: Most of these wells are found south of Orlando along both the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. The geology of Florida -- that whole lower Floridan Aquifer goes from Georgia out to the Bahamas down past the Keys and down the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf Stream is 4000 feet deep in the straits of Florida. Say you're five miles west of Miami. Well, you pump that freshwater out there, and it floats on top of the saltwater and it exits on the edge of the continental shelf at natural discharge points on the nearshore reefs. That's common knowledge in Florida geology. The sewage goes down and it comes out in the ocean.

CD: So it's basically your assertion and that of other groups, that because this sewage that's being pumped into the ground is percolating out into various spots between the Gulf Stream and the mainland.

TW: It's even possible that it's surfacing in the Bahamas. And there are even industrial wells that are permitted to pump much worse stuff than sewage -- medical waste, industrial waste-- whatever they want.

CD: Then in terms of the surf zone, I assume that this is a problem on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. I mean you've got these dolphin deaths in the Gulf that the Feds are now investigating. And the sea lice and red tide too.

Sea Lice Eruption: Oh Joy!
Photo: Florida Atlantic University

TW: Now there's this new staph infection that people are getting. There's a guy who is doing an investigative report on the health of the Gulf of Mexico. He was simply sitting on the beach at Fort Myers in the shallow water and he got a staph infection -- the flesh eating one -- on his butt. They tried 15 different antibiotics over many months before they found one that worked. There was a surfer in New Smyrna who went in the water with an open wound and caught the same thing on his forearm. Now they're saying fishermen are getting it.

CD: It's amazing that this has gone so far and that so much is allowed to be pumped into the ground.

See the Green off the Coast?
It's a Red Tide. Photo: NASA

TW: It's up to a million gallons a day in 300 municipal injection wells. Now that doesn't even include the industrial disposal wells or the shallow wells --there are 800 wells in the Keys where they take a trailer park, partially treat their sewage and then inject it only 60 feet down. Now they have a deep well in Key West, -- they've taken all the stuff from the septic tanks and small wells and are injecting it down a thousand feet. We really don't think that's helping - because rather than percolating down and gradually getting out to the reefs, it's like mainlining it straight out into the ocean. Seventy percent of the coral is dead in the Keys and now they want to list stag and elkhorn coral as endangered species because they're mostly gone.

CD: What does the state say about this?

TW: They say, well, it could be global warming, it, could be bird droppings, or it could be cruise ships. Because we have this confining layer -- and it's just not escaping this layer.

CD: But you think that's a bunch of BS?

TW: Yeah. I can't talk about it much right now because we're in the middle of some serious work on this. But put it this way: there are conduits down there that are just superhighways for this sewer water. In Miami, they did a test with red dye at the water treatment plant to see how long it took from the water to go from their well to the water treatment plant. They thought it would take a week for the dye to show up -- well, six hours later, the canals were turning red, and they had to warn people not to wash their clothes because their laundry would turn red. We have photos of this.

CD: So the ground under Florida is just super porous.

TW: It's called "karst". It's limestone. Huge caves and springs, and sinkholes. And you know, the signatures that they're getting in the shorebreak from Sebastian all the way up to Cocoa Beach is that the nitrogen is coming from human sewage. They can distinguish it from fertilizer. That doesn't mean that there's human bacteria there, but it just shows… and at Patrick Air Force base they've found this new algae that's from Australia, and it's migrated all the way up from Palm Beach and is taking over all the habitat now for the lobster and the snapper and grouper. And it's feeding on human sewage. That's something the fishermen and marine industry should be all over, and they acknowledge that it's a problem, but they're not doing anything about it.

CD: Explain a little more about how this sewage affects the water.

A Lesion-Infested
Turtle off the Coast of Bonair in the Caribbean.

TW: Many of the water quality problems in Florida are due to excess nitrogen. Excess phosphorous -- from fertilizer -- has been in the news for years, and continues to be a problem, but now the scientists are finding that excess nitrogen is at least as serious a problem. You could call it death by fertilization, or death by eutrophication (the lack of oxygen in the water). And again, nitrogen seems to be the culprit. If we report that Florida's waterways have too much fertilizer running into them, everyone will say "yeah, I know, agriculture runoff adds too much phosphorous." But that's the old information. The new info shows that nitrogen from human sewage is also causing the eutrophication of our waters, the death of our marine ecosystems and the resultant degradation of our surf zone waters.

CD: What does Surfrider believe are some of the direct effects on surfers?

TW: Number one effect on surfers is the red tide. It killed about 40 dolphins last week in the panhandle. But we had a red tide last year that started in New Smyrna -- they have an outfall right in the inlet. This was the worst red tide ever on the coast of Florida.

Well, red tide is a natural phytoplankton -- but it blooms when we feed it human sewage. That red tide bloom migrated over three months through Brevard County and south. It got so bad that you could hardly breathe on the beach. They couldn't even show real estate in Palm Beach county. The surf was 4-5 feet and it churned the water, broke up the bacteria and released a toxin into the air. If you take someone whose having respiratory problems and they live near the beach, it's now a point of saying move away from the beach and it will be okay. But what if people don't want to leave?

We're mammals just like the porpoise. If you take a human and put them in the same environment where they're having to breathe that air with the toxins in it then how bad could it get? Could it be lethal? Sure. I asked that of Dr. Sidney Bachus, she's a hydroecologist who specializes in problems with the aquifers. She said it's already been proven that it can be lethal.

This year, in the middle of winter, on some of the coldest days, they've had them over by Tampa and up the Panhandle. They say it's a summertime event, but now it's coming in the winter. Then you get sea lice -- these are jellyfish larvae that eat the floating algae which feed on human sewage.

CD: I got horrible sea lice in Palm Beach a few years back. Have you seen more of this in the last few years.

TW: This only started ten or twelve years ago. You never used to see sea lice here. Stephen Slater had to go to the hospital over them. He had a 103 temperature. Red tide and sea lice are the two things that really keep surfers out of the water. That's what we want to focus on. But you've also, of course got problems with sea turtle lesions, porpoises and manatees getting killed.

Propellors are not the only threat to Manatees.
Photo: www.savethemanatee.org

CD: Have there been hard scientific studies on this?

TW: Well, there is a lot of pressure on scientists. These scientists are pointing the finger at the EPA and NOAA, but that's where much of their funding comes from. So when we talk to scientists, they're paranoid of losing funding -- and some of them are friends of ours, they're surfers! And the state of Florida is on record saying, if we give you information about injection wells, and if we show you what we're pumping in the ground and how much -- you'll use it to sue us. They're on record saying that.

CD: So you can't get the info from the state, because the state's afraid of getting sued.

TW: Right. A group of Florida Democrats sponsored a bill requiring the state to post the injection well information on their Internet site. The state said, well, it's there already, but for us to put it all in one place and make it readable by the public would take too much money, so we're not going to do it. You go on the Department of Environmental website, you can't find any information on this at all.

CD: What is Surfrider doing on this issue right now?

TW: Well, you'll hear more soon, but what I can say now is that the Florida chapters of Surfrider are establishing an injection well challenge fund. That doesn't mean a legal challenge. We're doing educational work and asking the state to do these environmental impact statements. It's our way right now, of saying that we want the state to abide by Federal clean water law. The state will put it off on the EPA but the Federal EPA delegates authority back to the state. So the bottom line is that the EPA or the Federal Government is allowing the state to issue permits for these wells without an environmental impact statement. We absolutely believe that the injected sewage is coming out in the surf zone all around the state of Florida and it's causing these huge red tide blooms and sea lice not to mention the damage to mammals, and reefs and other marine life. Just like they proved that there's such a thing as a bounce swell off the Gulf Stream or a slot swell that comes through the Bahamas. Those were all theories, and this is our latest theory. We know we're gonna prove it.

The Incredible Migrating Australian Algae
Photo: Surfrider Palm Beach

CD: There are even more of these wells planned right?

TW: Yeah, they're really going to push things over the edge. They're called aquifer storage and recovery wells. They just want to take stormwater and just pump huge volumes of it into the aquifers. At lake Okeechobee they want to build 300 more at a million and a half apiece to store water as part of the Everglades restoration. But there's no science that proves it will work. They put water down there and then see how much of it they can get back up for the retrieval process -- well, they're only getting five to seven percent of it back. It's percolating down, and the force from it, is pushing even more of the sewage out into the surf zone.

They say, oh, it's clean water that's going down here in these new wells, but it's the same water that they won't let them pump into Lake Okeechobee. Because it's runoff from all the fields, car stormwater. It's bad stuff. And that's pretty ominous.

CD: Is this a big, widely discussed issue out there?

TW: 99 percent of the people in Florida have no idea that this is going on. We're also trying to inform folks in Hawaii and Puerto Rico -- they're injecting pharmaceutical waste in Puerto Rico. And in Hawaii in the Honolua Bay Watershed, there are all sorts of algae blooms and problems with staph infections there --it's brutal.

CD: What can or should they people do to learn more?

TW: Visit our website: www.surfriderpbc.org. A lot of the information is on the homepage.

Other Sources:

The State of Florida's Official Wastewater Site

Are Florida Beaches Safe? Health Department Doesn’t Know -- A Horrendous Account of a Staph Infection from a Florida filmmaker.

Red tide suspected cause of Florida dolphin deaths -- CNN

Facts on Staph Infections from the CDC

The Surfrider Foundation Sebastian Chapter's Info on Injection Wells

Florida Atlantic University's Information on Sea Lice -- Ouch!