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Toxins in West Palm drinking water a piece of Florida's bigger water problems | Frank Cerabino

Solving Florida's fresh water problems in West Palm Beach and North Florida are key to the state's long-term future.

Frank Cerabino
Palm Beach Post
City of West Palm Beach firefighters and workers with several other departments hand out bottled water to residents at Gaines Park on May 29 after an algal toxin was discovered in the city's drinking water supply.

In the end, we’re only as good as our water. 

For decades, Florida has mortgaged its future, opting for short-term economic gain over long-term sustainability of its most essential resource.

We’re seeing that play out in West Palm Beach now with its contaminated drinking water, and in North Florida, with its pristine springs being drained to alarming levels.

West Palm Beach water creates health scare

At the start of the Memorial Day weekend, the city of West Palm Beach belatedly advised its residents not to drink the city’s water because of abnormally high concentrations of cylindrospemopsin toxins, a poisonous substance caused by a bacterium present in blue-green algae.

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The toxins attack the liver and are seen as potentially dangerous to vulnerable people. And they can’t be removed from the water through boiling. 

The city passed out bottled water, and eventually added chlorine to the drinking water, advising residents that it might taste bleachy for a bit.

Palm Beach Post columnist Frank Cerabino

West Palm Beach is one of about a dozen communities that draws its drinking water from surface waters, rather than the vast aquifer that sits under Florida’s limestone foundation.

(The aquifer, by the way, is also being threatened by saltwater intrusion from rising seas caused by climate change. But that’s a freshwater peril for another day.)

Conditions ripe for trouble

The water drawn by the city of West Palm Beach comes from the Grassy Waters Preserve, a 23-square-mile wetlands area linked to the Everglades watershed. The water from the preserve flows into Clear Lake, a freshwater lake within the city that is bounded mostly by Interstate 95 to the west and Australian Boulevard to the east.  

Lately, the lake's been running dry because the city is keeping water from flowing into the lake while the algae bloom is occurring. 

A sandy shore on Clear Lake in West Palm Beach Tuesday, May 25, 2021 shows the dwindling water supply as the city can't take water through the L8 canal because of algae blooms. Clear Lake is the source of water for West Palm Beach and Palm Beach.

The city’s backup supply is from Lake Okeechobee.

The toxins that showed up in West Palm Beach’s waters late last month are part of what is becoming a regular occurrence in South Florida summers. 

For years, state lawmakers have allowed agricultural businesses and homeowners to inject algae-growing phosphates and nutrients into the state’s freshwater systems to levels that turn this water into a fish-killing, acrid-smelling, guacamole-looking swamp during the hotter periods of the year.

The blue-green algae, sometimes getting to 100 times above the harmful threshold, have at times clogged the coastline of Lake Okeechobee, the Lake Worth Lagoon, the C-51 Canal in West Palm Beach and the estuaries of St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers, which extend to both coasts.

A 21-year-old report on cyclindrospermopsin for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences warned of the increasing likelihood of this form of toxin showing up in Florida's drinking water. 

"Demands on groundwater supplies in Florida are currently exceeding or threatening to exceed sustainable yields, forcing water managers to rely more often on surface drinking-water supplies," the report done by Integrated Laboratory Systems read. "Existing surface-water treatment plants in Florida are currently not required to monitor for cyanobacterial toxins and may not be adequately equipped to treat surface waters for taste, odor, and toxins associated with immense cyanotoxic blooms."

Florida's long history of inaction 

The outside world has been warning Florida to clean up its act for decades.

The federal EPA has cited Florida for repeatedly violating the Federal Clean Water Act, and in 2010 called for Florida to set specific numeric nutrient limits on pollutants from farmers, municipal wastewater and stormwater utilities, and other polluters of state waters. 

Instead of complying, then-Gov. Rick Scott, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, and the state’s legislative leaders wrote a response to the EPA, saying that Florida rejected the “onerous regulation” of its waterways. 

“We each ran on a platform of fiscal responsibility and hear from numerous constituents about concerns of an overbearing federal government that’s placing burdensome regulations on Florida’s families and employers,” the letter said.

It turns out the smell of “freedom” is a lot like ammonia and rotting fish.

State lawmakers even rejected their own efforts to protect the state’s waters. 

Florida has more than 2.6 million septic tanks. When they leak, they produce the sort of nutrients that eventually work their way to the state’s fresh waters and help fuel algae blooms.

When homeowners blame sugar and cattle farmers for freshwater pollution, farmers point the finger back at homeowners with their fertilizers and septic tanks. 

In 2010, state lawmakers passed a bill that required homeowners with septic tanks to get their tanks inspected once every five years to make sure they weren’t leaking.

Two years later, after homeowners complained about paying the $400 cost to inspect for the leaky septic tanks, Scott and the Republican-led Legislature repealed their own mandatory inspection law. 

Another attack on Florida’s water resources has been going in North Florida, where development pressures resulted in a significant drawdown of the area’s freshwater springs and rivers. 

The flow of the Santa Fe River has been reduced by 28 percent over the past two decades due to over-pumping, environmentalists say.

And yet, water managers presented a plan this past week that would create a pipeline costing nearly $600 million that would take the brown murky water of the depleted Santa Fe and pump it to the aquifer feeding the pristine clear waters of the Ichetucknee River, which is also over-stressed, Politico reported.

"It is crazy, totally crazy," Robert L. Knight, executive director of the Florida Springs Institute, told Politico.

But maybe not as crazy in this time of depleted fresh water as the deal crafted earlier this year that gave Nestlé, the largest food and beverage company in the world, free use of about one million gallons a day of Florida’s fresh water drawn from another spring.

For those of you keeping score at home: That’s water belonging to the people of Florida given for free to a Swiss-based company so it can be bottled and sold back to the people of Florida in plastic bottles. 

And it wasn’t even the bottled water handed out to the West Palm Beach residents.

In the end, we’re only as good as our water.

fcerabino@gannett.com

@FranklyFlorida