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Recycling Florida Sewage Water and Nutrients
From:
Thomas Goreau
Date: December 29, 2007 7:36:06 AM EST
Subject: Re: Recycling Florida sewage
water and nutrients
Dear Governor Crist,
Mike Sole, and Janet Llewellyn,
Thank you for your most
important message below. I apologize for not replying sooner, I was a delegate
at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Bali, and in the
field doing coral reef and fisheries habitat restoration projects in remote
islands of Indonesia and could not access email.
The recent decisions by
your administration to discharge of
treated domestic wastewater through ocean outfalls in Southeast
Florida., and
to declare the best remaining reefs in Florida, and the only ones that can be
swum to from the beach, as Outstanding Florida Waters, are a dream come true for
the many environmental protection organizations and individuals from Key West to
Palm Beach who have fought for years to protect our vanishing coral reefs by
improving our water quality. Up to now all these efforts had been met with
official stonewalling at county, state, and federal levels. We applaud your
commitment to saving our environment for the future!
Best wishes,
Tom
Thomas
J. Goreau, PhD
President
Global Coral Reef Alliance
On Dec 16, 2007, at 3:21
PM, Llewellyn, Janet wrote:
Dear
Mr. Goreau,
Governor
Crist has asked me to respond to your recent e-mail regarding the discharge of
treated domestic wastewater through ocean outfalls in Southeast
Florida.
The
Department of Environmental Protection is working with the Florida Legislature
to examine possible changes to reduce reliance on ocean outfalls. Growing water
quality concerns and increasing water supply demands of Southeast
Florida suggest the need
for these changes. The potential to reclaim and reuse the water currently
being discharged represents a tremendous opportunity to help solve problems of
water supply and natural systems confronting Southeast Florida, including
increasing the protection for our valuable coral reef systems.
Water reuse
involves taking domestic wastewater, giving it a high degree of treatment, and
using the resulting high-quality reclaimed water for a new, beneficial purpose.
This includes activities such as urban and agricultural irrigation, industrial
cooling water and other uses, thereby conserving potable water. Public health
and environmental quality are protected by extensive treatment and
disinfection. Reuse reduces demands on valuable surface and ground waters used
for drinking water sources, eliminates discharges that may pollute valuable
surface waters, recharges ground water, and postpones costly investment for
development of new water sources and supplies. Statewide about 41% of Florida's
domestic wastewater is reused every day. However, the percentage is currently
much lower for the Southeast Florida coast.
Reducing reliance on
ocean outfalls will not be inexpensive, and can not be done overnight. However,
the costs should be weighed against the cost of developing other alterative
water supplies, of relying on water sources that are more vulnerable to drought,
and the effects of degradation of our coastal resources. The Department is
committed to working with all the involved stakeholders on a practicable
approach to reducing or eliminating the ocean outfalls.
You
mentioned using certain technologies for sewage treatment in Southeast
Florida. The Department is interested in environmentally acceptable
alternatives which provide the most economic and energy efficient methods prior
to discharge of reclaimed water or effluent. Permit applicants are encouraged
to evaluate alternative wastewater management techniques and discuss
alternatives with the Department. However, the Department does not endorse
particular products or processes for use. Each domestic wastewater facility is
assessed on an individual basis. Water reuse and the beneficial use of treated
residuals are promoted. If you would like to discuss these technologies
further, please contact Richard Addison at (850)245-8615.
You also
made a comment about the possible OFW designation of shallow reefs off Broward County.
The Department has been asked to consider designating an approximately six-mile
stretch of offshore waters in Broward County as
Outstanding Florida Waters (OFW). If you would like further information
concerning this process please contact Eric Shaw at 850-245-8429.
There are
several other options that may provide the type of resource protection you
seek. These options include working with area legislators to establish this
area as a state aquatic preserve or working with local government officials to
develop local resource protection plans to protect the reefs. State legislative
and local government support can be critical in resource protection efforts.
The Governor
and the Department appreciate your support for our efforts, and your dedication
to Florida’s
environment. Please feel free to contact us should you have further questions
or concerns.
Sincerely,
Janet G.
Llewellyn, Director
Division of Water
Resource Management
Florida Department of
Environmental Protection
2600 Blair Stone Road
Tallahassee, Fl 32399-2400
850/245-8676
Janet.Llewellyn@dep.state.fl.us
The
Department of Environmental Protection values your feedback as a customer. DEP
Secretary Michael W. Sole is committed to continuously assessing and improving
the level and quality of services provided to you. Please take a few minutes to
comment on the quality of service you received. Simply
click on this
link to the DEP Customer Survey. Thank
you in advance for completing the survey.
From: Jim
Smallwood [mailto:james@n-systems.net]
Sent: Sunday, November 11, 2007 10:56
AM
To: Thomas Goreau
Cc: flgov@myflorida.com; Sole,
Michael; Cry of the Water; Reef Rescue; DeeVon Quirolo; Craig
Quirolo; ECOMB; bo magnegas;
FOPGeorgia@aol.com McKay; Bill Wilson;
info@magnefuels.com
Subject: Re: Recycling Florida sewage
water and nutrients
Thomas
Goreau wrote:
GLOBAL CORAL REEF ALLIANCE
A non-profit organization for
protection and sustainable management of coral reefs
Global Coral Reef Alliance,
37 Pleasant Street, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
Telephone: 617-864-4226
617-864-0433
November
10 2007
Governor Charlie
Crist, flgov@myflorida.com
Michael
Sole, Michael.sole@dep.state.fl.us
Dear
Governor,
Congratulations on your administration’s decision to phase out the ocean sewage
outfalls as soon as possible! This can’t come too soon for
Florida’s few remaining corals. But it is not enough to
shut the outfalls: the nutrient rich waters should not be simply dumped
someplace else where they will cause problems, but should be treated to a level
that recycles the fresh water and nutrients on land where they are needed. New
technologies exist for this, but they are not being applied.
I work
closely with the citizen’s coral reef protection groups in Broward, Palm
Beach, Monroe,
and Dade Counties.
These local divers love their reefs and are shocked at the rate at which they
are being destroyed by masses of slimy bacteria and algae, growing in expanding
rings around all the ocean sewage outfalls. There is no doubt that the nutrients
in sewage fuel the massive growth of algae and bacteria that smother corals,
just like throwing a bag of fertilizer on the ground will give you weeds and not
roses. Coral reefs are THE most sensitive ecosystem to nutrients, being
smothered at concentrations that would affect no other marine habitat, and
requiring the strongest water quality standards and protection to survive. Even
though the slime blooms have been conclusively documented to expand with each
new pulse of nutrients, there has until now, been official denial by the EPA of
any link between nutrients and algae, and refusal to apply the Clean Water Act.
We applaud Mike Sole’s commitment to change this. Action
is needed right now: before the last surviving corals are destroyed, which could
happen any time that hot weather, algae blooms, hurricanes, and coral disease
hit together.
While
coral reefs are the worst place to dump the nutrients, all the other options of
places to dump them, from Lake Okeechobee, the Caloosahatchee River, the Saint
Lucie River, to the Everglades drainage canals, will cause unacceptable local
environmental problems as well. Nor is deep well injection a suitable option:
this simply hides the problem temporarily, but eventually these waters trickle
out sideways to the sea or upwards through cracks into the aquifers. Wherever
they emerge into the ocean, the bacterial and algal slime spreads over the reef,
from the offshore side that had been least affected by the ocean outfalls. When
I taught Hydrology at the University of Miami in
the 1980s I had my students look at the long-term impacts of deep well
injection, and we concluded that “out of sight, out of mind” was an ecological
time bomb that would go off decades later.
The best
option is to treat the sewage to a level that the nutrients can be used as
fertilizers on land, where the crop plants need them, and out of the water where
they kill corals. Adequate treatment would produce large amounts of freshwater
suitable for irrigation, and with minimal reverse osmosis and chemical
treatment, as drinking water to make up the increasing deficit. Unfortunately,
advanced and cost effective new technologies that would allow this are not being
applied in Florida. They
urgently need to be used as soon as possible.
Of the new
technologies that could be applied almost right away, two are especially
relevant for Florida.
The first method, Electro Coagulation, uses electrical discharges through sewage
passing through a compact machine to precipitate out the solids, nutrients,
bacteria, and sterilize the water. The resulting precipitate is so firm that it
does not need the huge sludge drying ponds that are an increasing problem to
site in South
Florida, and can be used as a fertilizer unless it is high in
industrial metals and chemicals. The method can easily be scaled and applied to
industrial plants to separate their waste stream at the source, and make
treatment and recycling of ordinary sewage more cost-effective. The water needs
only minimal treatment to be re-usable. The second method, MagneGas, developed
by a Florida inventor,
is similar in many ways and provides the same benefits, but uses much higher
electrical discharges to zap the sewage into a gaseous plasma, water, and solids
containing almost all the waste materials needing removal. While much more power
is needed for this process, it has the additional benefit that it produces a gas
fuel that can be used directly to power cars, generators, or welding machines.
If the infrastructure is provided to use the fuels produced, this method could
turn sewage into a valuable fuel as well as clean water and fertilizer. This
fuel burns clean, is sustainable, locally produced, and emits few greenhouse
gases.
I strongly
urge the State of Florida to
look into applying these remarkable new technologies on an experimental scale as
soon as possible, perhaps by turning over one of the many sewage plants using
outdated, inefficient, and costly technology into a pilot project to test the
new alternatives. Contacts for more information on these technologies and their
potential are provided in the cc list.
Finally,
I’d like to bring your attention to the fact that the finest reefs left in Florida,
the shallow reefs off Broward County,
still have no protection at all, are not designated reef areas, have no
management plan, and are imminently threatened by an unnecessary beach dredging
project. These reefs, long known to local divers, with huge ancient corals and
the largest stand of endangered staghorn coral I know of that remains in the Caribbean,
were first described in a publication by myself and Dan Clark, of Cry of the
Water. For years we have begged the State of Florida to designate this area as
Outstanding Florida Waters, and we have appealed to the South East Florida and
the United States Coral Reef Task Forces to designate the area a reef habitat,
develop a plan to protect it to at least the level of the Florida Keys Reef
Tract, and to instruct the members of the Coral Task Force to obey the law that
constituted them, which states that no government agency shall authorize or
engage in projects that kill coral. Our efforts have been stonewalled at every
step: EPA denies that nutrients cause algae blooms (as “controversial”!), NOAA
denies that global warming causes bleaching (they admit that high temperatures
are really bad for corals, but can’t admit it is really getting hotter), and the
Army Corps of Engineers denies that dredged sediments dumped on beaches kill
corals (even though local divers saw all the reefs of Southeast Florida killed
by beach projects, except for the last stretch or reef in front of the only
beach left that was never filled, in Broward, whose destruction the state now
has authorized). It is in our view
urgent to instruct these government agencies from the top to obey the law and
stop permitting any projects that kill corals, whether from sewage, sediments,
or greenhouse gases.
We urge
you to make saving Florida’s
coral reefs your living legacy for the future.
Sincerely
yours,
Thomas J.
Goreau, PhD
President,
Global Coral Reef Alliance
Coordinator, United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development Partnership in
New Technologies for Small Island Developing
States
CC:
Dan &
Stephanie Clark, Cry of the Water, Broward County
Ed
Tichenor, Reef Rescue, Palm
Beach County
DeeVon &
Craig Quirolo, Reef Relief, Monroe County
Luiz
Rodrigues, Environmental Coalition of Miami
Beach, Dade County
Ericka
D’Avanzo, Surfriders
Jim
Smallwood, Powell Electro Coagulation
Bo Linton
& Ruggero Santilli, MagneGas
Pat McKay
& Bill Wilson, FOP
Thomas
J. Goreau, PhD
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