Water Wars by Geniusofdespair

Speaking of water...

Florida is under water restrictions because of a drought, so it might be a good time to take another look at the 2002 Orlando Sentinel award winning 12 part series about water in Florida. You have to pay to get it out of their archives. It is still relevant in understanding Florida's water supply or lack thereof. As reported in the Herald: we now face a water shortage again this year. You might want to read Part 1 of this series to understand why a Sate with so much rainfall has water shortages (LAZY READERS: SCROLL DOWN TO: How the system works AND JUST READ THAT PART):

FLORIDA'S WATER CRISIS
A drying oasis
By Debbie Salamone
Orlando Sentinel Staff Writer
March 3, 2002
Florida is an illusory oasis in a world of water scarcity.

Our state could not exist without an abundance of water, because water is its very essence. Florida sits atop one of the world's most prolific sources of fresh groundwater. That hidden resource shapes the land, powers the weather, shores up the ground, keeps the sea at bay and nourishes the plants, animals and people.

Now, drop by precious drop, the water is going away.

That reality is already visible in many ways: The state's fiercest drought in a century still hasn't officially broken after nearly four years. It has brought wildfires, watering restrictions and sinkholes across the state. In places, flames consumed even the parched soil. The worst was over by last June, and weather experts hope for a return to normal rainfall soon.

But deeper, more fundamental concerns will outlive the drought. They are changing the way we think about water, dictating how we use it in our daily lives and defining how our state will grow.

Today the Orlando Sentinel begins a series of special reports focusing attention on what many experts see as the state's long-term water crisis. The series, the result of more than six months of reporting, will be published in 12 installments throughout the year. The water situation is particularly urgent in Central Florida, where officials have warned that portions of the underground water supply will be dangerously low by 2006.

The complex forces behind that crisis cannot be reduced to a single cause or consequence. The most critical issues facing the public cut across three broad areas of concern -- diminishing water supplies, increasing assaults on water quality and the scientific and political hurdles involved in finding long-term solutions.

• Water supply:
There is no longer enough pure groundwater to meet all the state's needs, and Florida can no longer take water for granted. Water will now be treated as a valued commodity. Lawn-watering restrictions likely will be year-round in the driest places. People will be asked to conserve and install low-flow plumbing fixtures. Water will cost more. Excessive groundwater pumping has put lakes, springs and wetlands at risk and increased the threat of sinkholes. Rapid population growth and unbridled development are at the root of Florida's water woes. The state will need 9.3. billion gallons of water a day to meet all the needs by 2020. That's nearly 30 percent more than is needed today. Still, there are no strong regulations that link how Florida is allowed to grow with how much water is available.

•Water quality:
With underground supplies dwindling, keeping Florida's waters clean is now more urgent than ever. But the same factors threatening the quantity of drinking water threaten its quality. More people have created more pollution. Leaking underground gas tanks, farm chemicals, septic tanks, waste dumps, pesticides and fertilizers are endangering Florida's waters every day. Draining water away and covering lands with concrete for new subdivisions, roads and parking lots has allowed too much water to run off to the sea without sinking in and replenishing the underground supply.

•Long-term solutions:
Many hurdles stand in the way of solving Florida's water troubles. Finding new water supplies will cost billions of dollars. Questions about who should pay and how the bill should be divided could erupt into costly fights. Tension is building in Central Florida, where water managers and utilities don't agree on when the underground supply will reach its ultimate limit. That could delay the start of new water sources, putting the environment - and the tourism, fishing and agricultural economies that depend on it - in peril. More wastewater will be recycled for things such as golf courses, crops and lawns. And more and more people will start drinking seawater with the salt removed. People in and around Tampa will get their first taste next year. And for Central Floridians, the move to desalinated water is no longer a question of if, but when.

In Florida, the public-policy dilemmas surrounding water now loom as large as the perennial issues of crowded classrooms, congested roads and high crime rates.

"It isn't schools that are going to break your bank," said Henry Swanson, a long-time Orlando water expert. "It's when you don't have enough water to flush the toilet."

A dry world

From space, Earth looks like a spinning ball of blue abundance. But what appears to be an unlimited water supply is really an illusion.

Worldwide, drinkable water is a scarce resource because less than 1 percent of Earth's water is pure. The rest is salty or locked out of reach in icebergs.

Millions of people worldwide can't get enough clean water to drink or grow food. Nearly 40 percent of all humans live in areas with serious water shortages, according to the World Resources Institute.

In some developing countries, people have to resort to shallow wells or stagnant pools easily contaminated with human and animal waste. Waterborne diseases account for an estimated 80 percent of all illnesses in developing countries.

World water demand has grown even faster than population. Underground supplies are being depleted in parts of China, India, Mexico, Thailand, North Africa, the Middle East and the western United States. Major crop-producing regions including the U.S. High Plains, California's Central Valley, the north China plain and portions of India are in trouble.

Water tables are falling by hundreds of feet in some places around the world, and the ground is subsiding as it loses its liquid underpinnings.

In Bangkok, for instance, scientists report that aquifer levels have dropped by 198 feet and the land surface has fallen by as much as 24 to 32 inches in the center of the city.

Saltwater contamination in freshwater supplies is a problem in South and Southeast Asia and is plaguing some Mediterranean countries. Access to water that traverses political boundaries is an issue in many foreign conflicts, including the Middle East.

Closer to home, the issues are much the same, particularly in the western United States, where shortages and environmental damage are widespread.

The Colorado River, which serves seven states, is so overtapped that water no longer reaches the Gulf of California, where fisheries suffer. Nearly all of the river's flow is siphoned off upstream to quench the thirst of Los Angeles, generate electricity for Las Vegas and irrigate crops in the deserts of Arizona, California and the Mexicali Valley.

The ground in Tucson, Ariz., is sinking noticeably. Land surfaces already have subsided 4 inches in the past 14 years. The city faces as much as a 10-foot drop in the next 25 years if groundwater pumping isn't reduced.

"You see flooding where it never occurred before. Buildings can be destabilized," said Mitch Basefsky, spokesman for the Tucson Water Department.

Scientists theorize that groundwater supplies in El Paso, Texas, will be dry in 20 years. Water shortages are even worrisome for areas bordering Lake Michigan and the rain-soaked suburbs around Seattle.

So it should come as no surprise that even in Florida -- a state that gets 53 inches of rain a year -- abundance is, too, an illusion.

How the system works

Shortages weren't supposed to happen in a state with water resources as vast as Florida's. Besides the bountiful aquifer, Florida has 50,000 miles of rivers and streams, 7,700 lakes, 3 million acres of wetlands and about 600 springs -- including 27 of the 78 most powerfully flowing springs in the nation.

These resources were millions of years in the making. Yet, in a big chunk of the state, there's a water shortage because of overuse and chronically poor planning as the state's human population grew from 2.7 million to 16 million in just the most recent half-century.

Understanding the strains that growth puts on Florida's water system requires a basic grasp of how that system works.

Florida has five main aquifers, which serve nearly all of the state's water needs. The largest, the Floridan Aquifer, underlies just about all of Florida and supplies most of the state's needs.

The aquifer averages 1,000 feet thick. It took form over 60 million to 70 million years as the skeletons and shells of sea life died and essentially stacked up. As the seas rose and fell, exposing the peninsula from time to time, sands and clay from northern mountains washed downstream into Florida, covering up the dead sea life. The animal remains formed layers of limestone.

Today, rains fall onto the land and work their way into the soil. The slightly acidic waters erode the limestone, carving caverns where rainwater percolates down and is stored. Water also seeps into the tiny pores of the limestone, much as water soaks into a sponge.

Even the direst water scenarios don't predict that the vast sponge could ever run completely dry. Hydrologists think there are more than a quadrillion gallons of fresh groundwater beneath Florida - one-fifth as much as in all of the five Great Lakes, 100 times the amount of water in Lake Mead on the Colorado River and 30,000 times the daily flow to the sea of Florida's 13 major coastal rivers.

With a quadrillion gallons of water, how could there be a shortage?

In Florida that's like asking how a human body that is about 70. percent water can ever be dehydrated. That's because without plenty of fresh water, what we call "Florida" simply dies.

Much of the state's water is needed simply to maintain its springs, wetlands, lakes and rivers.

And the fresh water acts as a barrier to keep out the seawater that lies beneath and all around the state. Pumping out too much fresh water reduces the pressure in the aquifer that keeps the denser, salty water at bay. Reducing freshwater levels by 1 foot can let salt water move upward as much as 40 feet. Saltwater intrusion has contaminated drinking wells in several areas of the state and is a constant threat as more water is pumped from the aquifers.

Because water constantly flows out of aquifers to feed springs, lakes, rivers, wetlands and estuaries, rain must replenish what's lost. Depending upon where a single drop of rain falls, it can take weeks to thousands of years to work its way through the system.

On average, Florida gets 53 inches of rain a year. Spreading that amount evenly over the whole state equates to 150 billion gallons of rain a day. But the rain isn't evenly distributed. For example, more rain falls in the Panhandle than in Tampa, where water demands are higher. Rain also falls mostly during the summer, leaving short supplies in drier months.

Still, 150 billion gallons of water sounds like a lot. But 110 billion gallons a day - or 38 inches annually -- evaporates in Florida's heat. In addition, plants drink up some of the water.

Another 8 inches runs off into lakes, rivers and wetlands or eventually to the ocean. That leaves only 7 inches to percolate into the aquifer. In many places, that's not enough.

That's why it's so important that rain that falls on Florida has a chance to get into the ground -- before it flows into streams and rivers and away to the ocean.

But the humans who live in Florida haven't always seen it that way.

Strains of development

In the early days of Florida's statehood, water was not viewed as the state's lifeblood. People drained it out of the way to get dry land for homes and farms.

Today, the canals, drains and ditches that produced dry land are contributing to water shortages, because water that would normally replenish the underground supply is rushed out to sea. Paved parking lots and other concrete surfaces that block water from penetrating the ground also share some blame.

Population growth and all that comes with it is the driving factor behind the thinning of Florida's traditional water supply.

In Central Florida alone, households, businesses and farmers use about 820 million gallons of water a day. If projections are right, that amount will grow nearly 50 percent by 2020 or even earlier.

The businesses, industries and people in Florida who receive public drinking water use 169 gallons a day per capita - enough to fill more than three large bathtubs. About half of all water from public utilities is used on lawns. As the fourth most populated state, Florida is the fourth largest user of water - behind only California, New York and Texas.

Overall, agriculture -- Florida's second-largest industry next to tourism -- takes the biggest chunk of fresh water -- 3.2 billion gallons a day, or 45 percent. Households and businesses come next -- 2.4 billion gallons a day, or about a third.

The rest of the water pie -- 22 percent, or 1.6 billion gallons a day -- goes to industry, power generation and recreational uses such as golf courses. Miami-Dade, Polk, Broward, Orange and Palm Beach counties use the most.

"We've been human," said Kirby Green, executive director of the St. Johns River Water Management District, which regulates water use in 19 counties in northeastern and Central Florida, including the Orlando area. "We do a lot of things because of a lack of education."

The biggest water needs are expected around heavily populated Orlando, the Tampa Bay area and South Florida.

It is the job of Florida's five water-management districts to regulate water use and ensure aquifer pumping doesn't hurt the environment.

But Florida has never adequately linked its development rules with the amount of water available. So while growth has emerged as the greatest single variable in the fate of Florida's water, the people charged with protecting the water supply cannot shut off development.

The water-management districts must simply find enough water for all the growth that local elected officials approve.

"We're not a growth-management agency. It's not in our mission. It's not part of our rules, and people want us to be," St. Johns district hydrologist James Hollingshead said. "We are to provide enough water for people but also protect the resource. Those two things, at some point, they will conflict with each other."
With more widespread shortages looming, state lawmakers this session are considering a rule to force cities and counties to consider water district reports about how much water there is before approving new developments.

The consequences

Pumping under the ground can have dramatic effects on the surface because springs, lakes, wetlands and streams are usually in some way connected to the vast underground water system. The complicated science of these interactions is often debated. But the bottom line is that there's less water for the surface when there's less underground.

Some of the most dramatic effects of excessive aquifer pumping have occurred in the Tampa Bay area, where water shortages erupted into costly water wars that have continued to varying degrees since the early 1970s. In some places, large lakes simply disappeared or shrank to half of their size or less. Some separated into ponds as the water disappeared and land was exposed. Spring flows have decreased. Wetlands have dried up so severely that cypress trees fell over dead.

Orlando hasn't seen such destruction, but it could be in store if alternative water supplies aren't brought online in time.

Already, since 1950, the underground aquifer levels have dropped 10 to 15 feet around Orlando and 5 to 10 feet in much of the rest of Orange and western Seminole counties. Levels have decreased about 5 feet or less in surrounding counties. By 2020, scientists predict the levels could drop by as much again if people turn to the aquifer for all their needs.

"If everyone continues to just look at it and say, 'All I'm going to do is pump more groundwater,' we're seeing a conflict ahead," said Hal Wilkening, director of the department of resource management at the water district.

Finding enough water for everyone is only half the picture. Protecting the supply Florida already has is growing more urgent. Pollution can diminish water supplies as surely as using too much.

Florida's groundwater already has been contaminated in areas by municipal landfills, leaking underground storage tanks, hazardous waste dumps, septic tanks, agricultural pesticides and fertilizers.

And those threats continue daily. Because Florida's waters are interconnected, pollution on the surface can affect groundwater and vice versa.

It used to be easy to assign blame. The polluters were big, bad and visible - phosphate mines, pulp and paper mills, fertilizer and wastewater treatment plants. They still create pollution for Florida, but increasingly tough regulations and new technologies have helped diminish some of their impacts. Advances in wastewater treatment, in particular, are the main reason some of Florida's polluted waters are cleaner today than years ago.

Today, one of the biggest threats to Florida's waters comes from a villain who's not so big and bad: You.

"The majority of our problems are now due to storm water, and that's dealing with what everybody does," said Chris Ferraro, water resource management program administrator at the Orlando office of the state Department of Environmental Protection.

From the oil that leaks onto the driveway to the pesticides and fertilizers spread on lawns, rains wash poisons into waters. Farming operations, from crops to livestock, also create pollutants.

New statewide efforts are under way to clean up those pollutants. The measure, which is being implemented nationwide, requires states to list their polluted waters, figure out the maximum amount of pollution the waters can handle each day and then develop a plan to stop pollution above those levels.

When water gets contaminated, the underlying shortage will grow worse still. Cleaning up contaminated groundwater can take decades, and the aquifer is an especially vulnerable water source because in many places it is close to the surface. It takes only one gallon of gasoline to contaminate 1 million gallons of water.

It has been rare for contaminants to reach deep enough to show up in public drinking-water supplies. But this threat, too, is but a different verse in the same song: As the state grows, so do the risks to water.

Finding more water

Eventually, people in Metro Orlando will drink seawater with the salt removed. Water officials already are looking for places to put a desalination plant, probably somewhere along the Brevard or Volusia coast. But it's uncertain how soon that will happen.

In the meantime, Orlando-area water managers are pushing hard to siphon water from the St. Johns River. But not everyone likes the idea because pumping, storing, treating and transporting the water could be costly.

Besides the new water sources, manipulating water that's already here is a popular - and often cheaper - idea. That includes simple things such as conservation and using more reclaimed water. It also includes more complex ideas such as directing storm water or wastewater into areas where it's likely to seep into the ground and recharge the aquifer, allowing people to eventually pump more out.

The ideas for Central Florida are not much different than what is being considered around the state. From one city to the next, the aquifer's characteristics change and make one option better than another.

In South Florida, a massive state and federally funded Everglades restoration project is a major focus. Man-made canals have moved too much water to the sea, and recapturing some of it will help restore the drying Everglades and solve some urban water shortages.

But part of the plan would use a controversial underground water-storage technique that is under attack by some environmentalists.

In areas outside the Everglades, numerous plans are under way for more use of reclaimed water and desalting water from deep underground and possibly the ocean.

In the Tampa Bay area, one desalination plant is under construction, and water suppliers are already planning a second one. Workers also are building a 15-billion gallon above-ground reservoir that will hold river and canal water for later use during the dry season.

In northwest Florida, shortages are mostly confined to the coastal areas of Santa Rosa, Okaloosa and Walton counties, where saltwater intrusion is the main threat. Workers are relocating some wells inland.

Fighting for water?

The only seemingly trouble-free spot is in the bend of Florida, along the Suwannee River, where there's plenty of water. That makes the Suwannee area look like a gold mine, ripe for a giant aqueduct to quench the thirst of its big, powerful neighbors to the south. But treading on a rural area's water to benefit city folk is a political land mine.

Right now, a state law says communities within a water district have to do everything possible to find water within their own geographic boundaries. But as water scarcity worsens, the appeal of moving water among regions of the state might be strong enough to dismantle that rule. The idea of water raids has made counties and entire regions wary of one another.

And from water raids could grow water wars.

Fights over who will pay for costly new water sources are inevitable. Capital costs will range into the billions of dollars. And consumers will have to pay.

In Central Florida, the battle line is drawn over exactly how much more water can be taken from the aquifer. Water district scientists and many of the 78 local utilities in the St. Johns district can't even agree on when a water crisis might hit the region.

Many utilities, most of which are publicly run by cities and counties, think the district is jumping the gun when it says more groundwater pumping will critically damage the environment as early as 2006. But the district retorts that a shortage is inevitable and fighting over the exact timing of its arrival misses the point.

"Don't we really need to be talking about what our alternative sources are going to be rather than spending two or three years or four years fighting over the accuracy?" district chief Green asked. "Why continue to argue about whether the models are accurate? Let's start trying to get the infrastructure in place."

The argument over whether a crisis even exists is an early warning that science alone won't solve Florida's water problems.

The real struggle is about money, politics and who will control what has become as valuable as oil. The stage is set. What comes next will forever change Florida's future.

"Whiskey is for drinking," Mark Twain is said to have observed. "Water is for fighting over."

It is a universal truth about a universal human need. In a drying oasis, it points to a trouble-filled future that, unfortunately, is no mirage.

Go to: http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/orlandosentinel/search.html for the rest of the award winning series.