ARTICLE COURTESY OF: Florida Weekly – BY ROGER WILLIAMS rwilliams@floridaweekly.com

Water stewards and clean water champions in the Sunshine State may now feel both pride and dismay.

Pride because Florida ranks far ahead of most other states in determining whether its fresh water is clean enough for swimming use, the all-purposes standard established 52 years ago by the 1972 federal Clean Water Act for “primary contact water recreation.”

Dismay, because much of it isn’t, according to data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the state Department of Environmental Protection and a private company that arranges guided hunting and fishing trips throughout the United States and outside our borders, Captain Experiences.

That company analyzed the federal and state data along with numbers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and released a recent report that pointed to these facts: Each year, on average, about 35,000 cases of waterborne illness occur in the United States.

Although the Clean Water Act requires every state to assess 100% of its recreational-use waters for impairment by industrial waste, sewage or agricultural runoff, only 19 states have assessed even 50% of their lakes and rivers.

Florida, happily, has assessed 95.1% of its lakes, reservoirs, ponds and wetlands used for swimming, boating and fishing, and 60.9% of its creeks, rivers and streams.

Unhappily, 75.1% of Florida’s lakes, reservoirs, ponds and wetlands rated too polluted for swimming, and almost half — 49% — of the Sunshine State’s rivers and streams, or at least those waters assessed for impairment.

The full analysis can be found at this link: captainexperiences.com/blog/states-that-you-should-think-twice-about-swimming-in

The data represents a sweeping failure of states to follow federal law and curtail or stop sources of pollution in fresh water, a failure long recognized that became comprehensively apparent in a study using state data first released two years ago on the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act.

In total acreage of fresh water — lakes, reservoirs, ponds and wetlands that don’t move — Florida ranked no. 1 among the states for most polluted lakes and streams. And it ranked no. 2 for most polluted estuaries (rivers, streams and creeks).

This year, say a chorus of voices working to end our fresh water dilemma, little has changed except the legislature’s grant of $25 million to the Water School at Florida Gulf Coast University to study the sources of pollution, and another $2 million to study Lake Okeechobee. Again.

“Studying these problems ad nauseam will not change the fact that we are not properly regulating polluters in the state of Florida. Until we do that, we won’t see meaningful progress in cleaning up our waterways.” — Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades

In a press release, Captain Experiences put it this way: “the Clean Water Act (CWA) has fallen short of its goal to make 100% of U.S. waters “fishable and swimmable,” in large part due to inefficient and insufficient water quality monitoring: Under the CWA, each state is supposed to assess all of its recreational-use lakes and rivers for impairments.”

“It helps to do both,” Ms. Samples adds — both study and regulate — “and a lot of money is flowing for studies and dirt-moving restoration projects, but it will be wasted if we’re not stopping the origin of the illness. In the case of Okeechobee, that comes largely from ag sources, and pollution from urban and suburban development. So rein in the biggest polluters and enforce regulations responsibly.”

And now, the water champions say, the broadest expanse of very dirty fresh water in the United States — Lake Okeechobee, the nation’s second largest by surface area at 730 square miles — is vulnerable again to overwhelming rains, just as it is every year.

At the beginning of August levels in the lake were about average, at 13.9 feet.

And just as they have done and would do again every year, if Okeechobee levels climb to 16 feet and above, the Army Corps of Engineers would release destructive quantities of polluted water west down the 60-mile Caloosahatchee River basin to Charlotte Harbor and the Gulf of Mexico, and east down the St. Lucie into the southern terminus of the 136-mile long Indian River Lagoon at Stuart.

Those releases carry so much legacy pollution from agricultural fields, primarily phosphorous and nitrogen, combined with current agricultural pollution from ranches and farms north of the lake that fresh, brackish and saltwater marine environments all can become mortally imperiled. All of it joins runoff from agricultural operations and septic-system communities along with the suburban and urban communities where fertilized lawns remain popular and water treatment systems sometimes malfunction.

While that’s not new news, the water champions say the fact that little progress has been made in changing the statistics since 2022 and for years before that has created a new sense of dismay, followed by a new sense of purpose.

CONTINUE READING THE ENTIRE FLORIDA WEEKLY ARTICLE…

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ARTICLE COURTESY OF THE WAVE

The majority of Floridians are aware of the issues following the largest lake in their state. Lake Okeechobee is almost 30 miles wide and is a truly impressive site. With a lake this big, one would assume that swimming must be very popular. Yet this is not the case with Lake Okeechobee due to the heavy pollution. This also applies with fishing: Okeechobee is a popular fishing spot but the fish there are not safe to eat due to the toxic algae that populate the lake. The pollution does not just stay in Lake Okeechobee: water movement causes Lake Okeechobee pollution to become an issue across Florida.

One of the main causes of all the pollution is agriculture, as it causes pesticides and fertilizer which run off into the lake. This has caused a large amount of phosphorus in the water, which as a result causes toxic algae blooms this is called eutrophication. These algae can be very dangerous to Florida ecosystems. When Lake Okeechobee overflows or drains, the runoff will go into the Everglades. This is essential for the Everglades to thrive, but because of the lake’s pollution, it has been causing some issues.The Everglades is an ecosystem that is already struggling due to urbanization and pollution. The discharge causes blooms of blue-green algae which is incredibly harmful to wildlife and humans. The algae have killed pets and livestock that have drank it and made humans incredibly ill. It is caused by phosphorus and nitrogen, which makes  Lake Okeechobee the perfect spot for it to grow. With the Everglades being home to over 70 endangered species the algae put them at high risk. 

The pollution of lakes also affects our oceans. This is because the water from Lake Okeechobee is released into rivers and often ends up in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. The discharge of Lake Okeechobee then causes red tide blooms as a result. Red tide is another type of algae that happens naturally in the environment but has been worsened due to pollution. Red tide can make humans very ill, especially those with respiratory conditions, and will affect sea life. The University of Florida has proven that there is a connection between red tide and the polluted waters of Lake Okeechobee. It was also suspected, but there never has been solid proof till recently. 

This is not a recent issue; Lake Okeechobee has been facing damage since the 1980s. The issue with agricultural phosphorus is that it is hard to get rid of.

Continue reading The Pollution of Lake Okeechobee…

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