Florida’s Slimed Waters Should Prompt National Wake Up Call

In 1969, Time magazine published an arresting photo of a river so badly polluted by an oil slick that it actually caught fire.

That image became a flash point for the nation’s disgust with widespread pollution. Three years later, citizens pressured Congress to pass the Clean Water Act. Today, we know that the photo of Ohio’s Cuyahoga River that Time published in 1969 was actually taken 17 years earlier. But, for whatever reason, the extent of the Cuyahoga’s pollution problem didn’t resonate nationally until Time published that fiery photo in 1969.

We’re hoping that the shocking images of fluorescent green slime coating Florida rivers and beaches, published worldwide over the Fourth of July holiday, will serve as another national wake up call. Although this may be the first time people around the country have seen this lurid slime, it’s not Florida’s first horrific algae outbreak.

As Earthjustice attorneys explained to media who called us from all over the U.S., we’ve been representing citizens trying to stop these algae outbreaks for decades. Earthjustice has argued in court and in the press that it is not fair for corporations to dump their waste into our public waterways, causing algae outbreaks that wreck the environment that our families, our tourist-based economy and our renowned wildlife depend on.

Thousands of citizens are using their cameras and social media accounts to document the ugly truth of what’s happening in South Florida, where the government pumps billions of gallons of water polluted by Big Agriculture out of Lake Okeechobee, in the state’s center, through rivers and out to the east and west coasts. You can check on-the-scene reports here and here and on Twitter at #indianriverlagoon. The putrid water slimes delicate coastal estuaries, the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean.

Pollution in the once lovely, sand-bottomed Lake Okeechobee comes primarily from fertilizer spread over industrial-scale sugar cane and vegetable fields and from manure runoff from huge beef and dairy cattle operations. This is the inland Florida that tourists don’t see. Lake Okeechobee covers 730 square miles; the muck on the bottom is now so full of phosphorus and nitrogen from decades of fertilizer and manure pollution that it can no longer be diluted. The lake’s algae outbreak now covers 200 square miles and NASA has documented it from space.

This pollution needs to be cleaned up at the source—period. In recent years, Earthjustice has filed numerous lawsuits to try to make that happen:

• We fought to set a maximum daily limit for phosphorus allowed into Lake Okeechobee. This limit continues to be exceeded year after year.
• We challenged the “backpumping” of agricultural wastewater into Lake Okeechobee. Florida agricultural operations have been allowed to take water out of the lake, irrigate fields with it and then pump the water—now polluted with fertilizer, pesticides and other pollutants—back into the lake.
• We filed a challenge to stop government water managers from using taxpayer-funded pumps, pipes and canals to transfer polluted water from one place to another. Our challenge to an EPA rule allowing this practice is currently being appealed.
• We sued the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to enforce water quality standards on the Caloosahatchee River, which flows from Lake Okeechobee westward into the Gulf of Mexico. This case is also being appealed.

Will this summer’s noxious algae outbreak turn out to be our “Cuyahoga-on-fire” moment? We hope so. But even if it isn’t, we and thousands of anglers, surfers, swimmers, boaters and beachgoers will still be working hard to stop this environmental disaster, long after the cameras have moved on.