St Lucie River Pollution Problems

[teejayevans]

see:
WPEC-TV CBS12 News :: News - Top Stories - St. Lucie River conditions worsen: Salinity levels close to zero at inlet

Summary is all the polluted water from farmland in the middle of the state drain in Lake Okeechobee and with all the rain, they have to dump it into rivers at such a rate it's destroying everything. Nice....
Tom

[Delancey]

Horrible, blame the farmers? Blame the rain? Or blame ourselves?

Small Is Beautiful - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[BareFtGrl]

This is just awful!

[teejayevans]

Originally Posted by Delancy

Horrible, blame the farmers? Blame the rain? Or blame ourselves?

Small Is Beautiful - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

They need to recycle the water, this would save them a lot of fertilizer since the runoff water clearly has more than it's share, shouldn't be that hard to redirect runoff into holding ponds (most modern golf courses do this to save water and prevent pollution).
Tom

[fla.sailor]

We are seeing the same mess on the west coast from the Caloosahatchee. The tides are higher and on our canal, the water is so dark you can no longer see the bottom.

-dennis

[Cheechako]

It's the same everywhere. When things build up, there is a tendency to just dump it in the sea. It's kinda like sweeping dust under a rug, out of sight out of mind. It pisses me off. The Japanesse Nuke plant is doing the same thing, all municipalities on the water wash everything off the roads, lots etc into the sea with no treatment. It's amazing how resilent the sea has been. The farmers are sold "round-up ready" seed and it gives them better production. It cant go on forever. The only solution is reducing population...

[Stu Jackson]

Oh, no, it's ALL THE BOATERS DAMNED FAULT. Them and their insidious bottom paint and dumping all their raw sewage into the ocean!!!! How dare they anchor out and spil my tremendous $4 million dollar view!

[Cheechako]

Yep.... not the millions of tons of chemicals they call fertilizer, or the oil and grime off the "paved paradise", or the raw sewage the municipalities dump into the bay when it rains too hard for them to keep up.... it's those damn rich boaters!

[teejayevans]

Originally Posted by Cheechako

It cant go on forever. The only solution is reducing population...

No, they could build some holding ponds and recycle the water...its not rocket science, and it's not that expensive, not buying just 1 of these will be enough money to pay for it 10x over: Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tom

[skipmac]

Even worse, the giant dead zone on the Gulf coast around the mouth of the Mississippi. All this is really scary.

[pete33458]

Originally Posted by teejayevans

No, they could build some holding ponds and recycle the water...its not rocket science, and it's not that expensive, not buying just 1 of these will be enough money to pay for it 10x over: Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tom

Tom: nothing personal (really), but while this sounds like a good idea, Lake Okeechobee (which represents the cause of this problem, in the form of release of excess dammed water to control flooding) IS a holding pond, not in its natural state, of course, but certainly in its current state, courtesy of the Army Core of Engineers, driven by developers, driven by profit, driven by demand... Making it bigger, or building ancillary holding ponds, doesn't fix the problem, it just delays the outcome and causes a new problem (the loss of natural habitat associated with excavating and flooding the relevant land). Regardless of how many F35s or B1s or whatever you divert to cover the cost, holding ponds are the problem, not the solution. Before the Everglades and the South Florida aquifer were controlled by man (that means us), freshwater discharge into the St Lucie River and all other tributaries worked just fine.

To paraphrase a friend of mine, who said it quite eloquently in a different context: "No matter how smart you think you are, you'll never be as smart as (nature)." What would be nice would be that, going forward, we could learn from our past mistakes. But I don't think so. Pete

[tamicatana]

Dr Jeff Masters on the subject:
Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog : The Battle to Draw Down Lake Okeechobee | Weather Underground

[pbiJim]

Excessive releases may be a bad thing, but a dam break is much worse.

I see the big spike on that water level chart from Hurricane Issac, which I think was actually still tropical storm Issac when it passed over that area. I remember that Tropical Storm Issac dumped about 15" of rain on the town of Wellington in a single day & left parts of that town flooded for a month. I don't think that it is unreasonable for the corps to adjust water levels in the lake so that the dam can tolerate another event of that type. Those sorts of things do happen in South Florida.

Better planning for the future does seem to be needed.

[Andy73]

Not just the farmers, Florida is one of the top Phosphate miners in the US... search Youtube for The Greatest Culling for an interesting documentary on it. It focuses on Floridation of water, but around the 20-30min mark it discusses the Florida phosphate mining and its impact.

[dave c]

Dead Ocean but you should see the nice green golf courses we have in Florida! Instead of getting real about our pollution problems our Gov is only worried about lobbyists and special interests, and who do you think they are? If you guessed the polluters you guessed right.