Now it's all coming out. After years of allowing virtually all the blame for Indian River Lagoon degradation to go to Lake Okeechobee discharges, suddenly state authorities acknowledge that millions of gallons of waste is pumped directly from municipal sewage plants into the lagoon system.
In Cocoa Beach, for instance, we're looking at direct sewage discharges to the lagoon. According to a comprehensive story by Jim Waymer in Florida Today, Cocoa, like several other cities along the lagoon, is allowed 90 days of emergency discharges to the Banana River during heavy rains, when flows exceed capacity.
The plant discharged 25 days last year, averaging 4.6 million gallons per day, Waymer writes. The discharges wind through a series of five ponds on the nearby city golf course before emptying to the Banana River. This year, the plant has discharged for five days, averaging 4.8 million gallons per day.
Be patient, the city begs -- those large discharges will end when the city completes a deep injection well in a few years.
Gary Roderick, an environmental consultant from Martin County and former county and state administrator, calls it "the 5,000-pound gorilla that's not saying anything right in the middle of the room."
Roderick told Waymer, "This is like a sleeping giant causing a silent scream in the lagoon."
Sewage sludge. "Biosolids," if you like euphemisms. Farmers who love the stuff label it fertilizer.
But sludge is what’s left over after sewage is treated. It’s given class AA, class A or class B status, they say, depending on the level of bacteria, metals and other contaminants removed. Class AA is the cleanest level of treated sludge. But even the cleanest still contains some pathogens and nutrients that can feed algae blooms if they reach water.
The Florida Department of Environmental Protection defends state regulations concerning sludge. It claims they protect public health and minimize potential nutrient impacts.
“As with any agricultural activity fertilizing land, there will be trace quantities of nitrogen and phosphorus leaving the site, but the state laws and rules act to minimize nutrient migration,” Jessica Boyd, a spokeswoman with DEP, told Florida Today.
Who knows how much class AA sludge — the most treated, driest form of the goop — goes into the lagoon watershed and eventually winds up feeding algae blooms? Said the paper, "The uncertainty worsened in 2010 when new Florida rules left unregulated this 'cleanest' class of sludge, in cases when it’s mixed with mulch and marketed and distributed as fertilizer."
Then cities could give it away, sell it for cheap or pay haulers to take it away to spread virtually anywhere, untracked. Farmers scored cheap, sometimes free fertilizer, and sewer plants cleaned their hands of the burdensome stuff.
I remember at the turn of the last century when sludge was trucked up to Martin County from Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties and parceled out to small farms there. I watched the trucks unload it. Plus, you could smell the stuff when the wind was in the right direction in Palm City.
When I asked DEP about it, the only answer I got was, "it's been treated and deemed safe."
Haulers can dump the cleanest class of sludge, class AA, just about anywhere but in open water or on land near wetlands, ditches and other waters. That doesn't mean it doesn't work its way into canals and rivers.
Here's a stunner: Florida Today research claims sometimes trucks spread more of the fertilizer than crops or grass need, and well beyond what waters can withstand without algae blooming. Audubon of Florida in 2009 estimated sludge was getting spread on the Indian River watershed at 450 to 1,620 times the ideal level to meet nitrogen and phosphorus limits for Lake Okeechobee.
Roderick is now saying spreading sludge on rural lands may pose a long-term risk for the lagoon and other Florida waterways. While it’s uncertain how much nitrogen and phosphorus from sludge reach the lagoon, he thinks the amount could be significant.
He told the newspaper utilities are using the watershed, “banking” the two nutrients there -- and in the long-term, the bad stuff gets deposited to the lagoon, the St. Johns River and other waters. “They’re all using (the watershed)," he said, "and we don’t know it. It’s a shell game."
So, even as communities do what we all know is the right thing -- convert thousands of septic tanks to sewer systems -- they still run the risk of spreading more nitrogen- and phosphorus-rich sewage sludge along the lagoon watershed.
Even waste pumped from septic tanks gets treated to class AA or B biosolids, then spread over land. That means it also stays in the watershed and eventually can wash back into surface waters and ultimately the lagoon.
The Legislature needs to step in here and come up with a bill that can sort out a mounting donneybrook between the condition of our waterways and farmers. Farmers don't see the problem. They see sludge as a huge money saver, and less damaging to the environment than expensive chemical fertilizers. They say they should be able to use sludge because the government says it's safe and they take steps to manage the nitrogen and phosphorus.
Meanwhile, the lagoon system deteriorates by the week, the month, the year.
Florida Today quoted Martin County environmentalist Maggy Hurchalla: Yearly, about 300,000 dry tons of biosolids contribute 33 million pounds of nitrogen and more than 13 million pounds of phosphorus into the state’s watersheds, she noted, based on the levels of the two nutrients typically found in sludge." Class AA and B biosolids contain an average 5.5 percent nitrogen and 2.2 percent phosphorus, according to a 2009 report by Audubon of Florida."
Of the 300,000 dry tons of sludge produced annually in Florida, 37 percent gets spread on land, 34 percent goes to landfills and 29 percent is distributed and marketed as commercial fertilizers, according to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
Florida Today asks, are nitrogen and phosphorus from sewage sludge reaching the lagoon?
"There is plenty of evidence that the usual ingredients of sewage are," says Waymer. "A 2009 study, for example, found triclosan, a widely-used antibacterial chemical widely used in soaps and hand washes, in blood plasma from bottlenose dolphins in the lagoon."
But that could be coming from septic tanks, sewer leaks, sludge or all the above.
Brian Lapointe, whom Sunshine State News has often quoted, a scientist at FAU-Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution in Fort Pierce, sees septic tanks and direct sewage discharges as the larger contributor of nutrients to the lagoon.
Lapointe told Waymer the nitrogen and phosphorus in class AA biosolids is lower than class B and most of the two nutrients are in an organic form, less biologically reactive than artificial fertilizers. But the two nutrients can become available for plant growth over time, he said.
As I have tried to point out for the past three years -- and now Florida Today has done a better job documenting it than I ever did -- there are agents of lagoon and estuary degradation at work far removed from what goes in and out of Lake Okeechobee. I'm not saying these agents are the only thing fouling our water, but they are all practices within our control to fix.
Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or at 228-282-2423. Twitter: @NancyLBSmith
