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Reef Rescue Volunteers Take to the Air and Sea Reef Rescue volunteers took to the air and sea to conduct a survey and provide independent verification of dye migration from the Boynton Beach Inlet and the Delray Beach ocean sewage outfall. On Thursday February 22, 2007 the South Central Regional Wastewater Treatment plant in Delray Beach began a week long series of tracer dye tests, according to facility director Bob Hagel, “to vindicate their stance that pollutants from other sources, including the Lake Worth Lagoon, were causing the damage to the reef.” The tracer dye test is the latest attempt by the Delray sewer plant to shift the blame for a coral killing algae bloom away from the plant’s 13 million gallon per day ocean sewage discharge pipe. The sewer plant has hired NOAA as their consultant to help build a case to implicate other causes of the localized algae bloom found only on Gulf Stream Reef. The plant’s consultants in the past have blamed the bloom on nutrient-rich deep water upwellings, lack of algae eating fish and tidal flow from the Boynton Beach Inlet, this in spite of evidence the algae bloom is confined to one reef found immediately down current of the sewer pipe.
Sewer plant consultants released dye into the Boynton Beach Inlet during an outgoing tide, from midnight to dawn, on February 22, 2007. The dye traveled northward with the current away from the algae smothered reef system. Drift buoys released with the dye were later recovered 15 miles north of the inlet. Dye mixed with buoyant freshwater sewage effluent released from the ocean outfall 90 feet below, boils to the sea surface as testing of the sewer pipe begins.
With the beaches of Delray in the background the pigmented sewage is captured by the current and travels north to Gulf Stream Reef, site of the algae bloom. Reef Rescue spotter boats track the tracer dye plume and collect GPS coordinates to document its position.
Palm Beach
County Reef Rescue |
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