Slime-choked waterway

<Editor's Note: this op-ed by David Guest, managing attorney of Earthjustice in Florida, recently appeared in newspapers throughout Florida. Also, view multimedia interview with David Guest.>

At the end of August, a large, disgusting algae outbreak slimed Old Tampa Bay. Two months earlier, an algae outbreak in the Caloosahatchee River near Fort Myers turned the river bright green, smelled like raw sewage, and made thousands of fish go belly up. Water with algae outbreaks like this is so toxic that health authorities say you shouldn’t touch it, much less drink it or swim in it. It can give you rashes, respiratory problems, and even kill you.

U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, found that out the hard way. He swam in the same type of toxic algae outbreak in Grand Lake, Oklahoma in June and said he became “deathly sick” that night with an upper respiratory illness. “There is no question,” Ihhofe told the Tulsa World, that his illness came from the toxic algae in the lake. Oklahoma health officials had warned people not to touch the water, swim in the popular lake, or eat fish from it. Like Florida’s outbreaks, the one in Grand Lake was fueled by the so- called “nutrients,” nitrogen and phosphorus, which come from inadequately treated sewage, fertilizer, and manure.

Arlington Boat Ramp off of University Blvd. in Jacksonville during 2005 St. Johns River Bloom Event. (Photo: Neil Armingeon / St. Johns Riverkeeper)

As I write this, half of the 75-mile long Caloosahatchee River in southwest Florida is covered by nauseating green slime. It’s a heartbreaking sight – dead fish wash up along the banks, and waterfront homes have a pricey view of a stinking mess.

President Obama could still find tar balls today on Gulf coast beaches, as he did a year ago (pictured here).

A year after BP’s oil spill devastated the Gulf of Mexico, we are analyzing the cleanup efforts and, sadly, find them both paltry and embarrassing.

The U.S. Coast Guard has issued an unbelievably bogus report that says that no further remedial action is needed to clean up BP’s massive mess. Huh? The tourist boosters don’t like to say it, but this oil is not gone, not by a long shot. It exists in floating mats in the ocean, on the floor of the Gulf, and underneath the sand on countless beaches. 

Earthjustice has filed a petition on behalf of the Florida Wildlife Federation under the federal Data Quality Act which challenges the Coast Guard’s ridiculous claim that no further cleanup is needed. The Coast Guard made its claim in a document called a Net Environmental Benefit Analysis (“NEBA”), which is the government’s method to “evaluate the tradeoffs related to spill response and cleanup techniques,” and to determine how best to strike a balance between “enough” cleanup and “too much” cleanup.

From the Now We’ve Seen Everything Department (A large and busy department here in the Sunshine State):

Florida Republican Congressman Tom Rooney has introduced language into the federal budget bill to block the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from implementing important new public health protections for Florida.

As you’ve read in this space before, the EPA’s new water pollution limits are designed to control the public health threat posed by the green slime that continually breaks out on Florida waterways. This horrid slime is fed by partially treated sewage, animal waste and fertilizer pollution. (Pictures here. ) Florida health authorities have had to close swimming areas and drinking water plants because of this toxic algae. The algae outbreaks can cause breathing problems, sores, rashes, illness, and even death.

"As Stoneman Douglas warned: we're not done." (Mark Wallheiser)

Many years ago, a friend of mine was just starting out in the environmental movement, and the late Florida environmental activist Marjory Stoneman Douglas (she authored the classic Everglades: River of Grass) offered some advice.

If you're going to do this kind of work, prepare to have your heart broken, because even when you win, you're never done.

So it is with our landmark lawsuit to get enforceable limits on the amount of sewage, fertilizer and animal waste that run into Florida's public waters. Even though we've had bright green slime covering rivers and lakes, even though health authorities had to close famed Florida beaches because of pollution, and even though drinking water has been fouled, polluters and misguided politicians continue to fight cleanup.

Julington Creek Marina. 347 ug/l, M. aeruginosa. Photo taken on July 31, 2009. (Florida Water Coalition)

Our long fight to get clear standards to control pollution from fertilizer, animal waste, and sewage hit a major milestone this week (Nov. 15), when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced new, enforceable limits in Florida—the first ever in the U.S.

EPA scientists worked in conjunction with scientists at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to set these important limits on excess nutrients—phosphorus and nitrogen—which are wrecking waters in Florida and all over the U.S.

This first set of new EPA standards governs nutrient discharges into Florida's freshwaters and lakes. The limits will be phased in so that industries have time to make needed changes to clean up dirty discharges.

Green slime caused by polluted waters

The EPA committed to set these new limits after Earthjustice, representing Florida Wildlife Federation, Sierra Club, Conservancy of Southwest Florida, Environmental Confederation of Southwest Florida, and St. Johns Riverkeeper, sued in 2008.

It turns out that these former secretaries are at drastically at odds with public opinion. The EPA reports that it has received 22,000 public comments on the proposed new nutrient pollution standards, and 20,000 of those comments were in support of the standards.

People want clean water! Sadly, Florida is rock bottom in the U.S. in terms of protecting its waters from pollution. Across the United States, scientists report that 30 percent of bays and estuaries and 44 percent of streams have unsafe water. But in Florida, it is much worse—more than 98 percent of the state's bays and estuaries, and more than 54 percent of its streams, are unsafe to swim and/or fish in. The BP oil spill disaster this summer showed us that even the possibility of pollution can chase away Florida's number-one economic engine—tourism.

Grinning for good reason...

Earthjustice won a key victory at summer's end in our long-running fight to restore the Florida Everglades. A court-appointed Special Master recommended that the state be allowed to abandon a $700 million reservoir project in the southern Everglades Agricultural Area.

Why is this good news? The reservoir was once an important part of Everglades restoration, but the giant public works project was mothballed—and rightly so—when Florida negotiated a deal to buy large swaths of Everglades land from the U.S. Sugar Company. The U.S. Sugar land holdings are a better alternative to store and filter polluted runoff as it runs down the peninsula into Everglades National Park and Florida Bay.

St. John's River algae infestation - Courtesy Jacksonville University

Florida's St. John's River is fouled this summer with green slime, and dead fish are washing up on its shores. Every time it rains, nutrients like phosphorous and nitrogen poison this river and others all over Florida. The poison comes from sewage, animal manure and fertilizer.

It is a crisis big enough that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency agreed in November 2009 to set the first-ever legal limits for nutrient poisoning.

But, now, polluters are trying to derail efforts to clean up Florida's waters. They arrived enmasse recently at Congress, where they met with numerous federal lawmakers to try getting a rider put on the federal appropriations bill. The rider would, unbelievably, prevent EPA from setting important new limits on nutrient pollution. The rider may be introduced in a few weeks.

We have our fingers crossed here in Florida that the gushing oil well in the Gulf of Mexico is finally plugged. This has been a nightmare summer for all of us.

Now we begin the grim tasks of assessing the damage to vast stretches of some of the most productive wetlands and shorelines in the world—wetlands that no one knows how to clean up.

We will see what toll the oil and dispersants take on wildlife. And we will see how oil, sprayed by dispersants and now floating around in the water column, behaves in storms.

Our other task is to make sure that the government and the oil industry learn from this disaster.