FPL, salt water intrusion, and the latest, great battle for Biscayne Bay ... by gimleteye

Florida Power and Light, the multi-billion dollar energy corporation, is nearing completion of plans to build two new nuclear reactors at Turkey Point in South Dade. Its existing nuclear facility cools process water through a miles of cooling canals. For many years, regulators have been concerned about salt water intrusion in the area. With the recent drought and monitoring of chloride levels, the concern has elevated to alarm. Salt water, moving in under the thin layer of groundwater, could wreck South Dade farmland and the drinking water wells in Homestead, serving the Florida Keys. Those wells are about ten miles from the edge of Biscayne Bay.

Carl Schumacher was a young boy when he moved to Homestead in 1912. Today, his brief remembrances are bound in xeroxed pages. They make curious reading, of an earlier time when the presence of radioactive isotopes like tritium in ground water were not a fact. I'll share with you what he wrote about the movement of surface water in exactly the place that regulators are concerned about salt water intrusion:

"Before man came to South Dade County, the land between Biscayne Bay and the pine and rock land from Cutler to Florida City would be under water all summer," Schumacher writes of a landscape covered now with roads, strip malls, farmland and tract housing. Farmers wanted to drain the land to quicken the arrival of growing season. The Miami Land and Development Co. dug a large canal from Biscayne Bay to Florida City. The canal started about a quarter mile south of Palm Drive, near Krome, and ran a distance of about 9 miles straight to the bay.

In exactly the area where, today, agencies are fretting about the movement of salt water westward, in Carl Schumacher's day, water flowed eastward through the canal, seventy five feet wide and twelve to eighteen feet deep. It didn't just flow eastward. It raced "at about five miles per hour" the entire length of the canal.

In other words, the pressure of water rushing out of the Everglades was so great that a river of water flooded eastward. That's the opposite direction from which salt water is moving, today, under a thin stagnant layer of groundwater. The water, all nine miles of it, was "clear, cool and pure".

When he was a boy, Schumacher and his friends used to keep a look out for road excavations in Homestead. As soon as the tractors left, carrying away road fill for local roads, the holes left behind would fill with water clear as crystal. Every one was a new swimming hole.

"As progress goes, so went the canal", Schumacher wrote. "Later Florida Power and Light closed the mouth of the canal so as to make it a part of their cooling chain of canals. He remembers wistfully, "The banks along the canal would be lined with cane pole fishermen trying for brim, perch, and bass until they got close to the Bay and then they fished for snapper, grouper, snook, grunts, sea trout and red fish. When you went fishing in these waters, you were very seldom disappointed."

Today, southern Biscayne Bay is in crisis, mostly for lack of clean, fresh water in the right places at the right time of year. It's the story of the Everglades. Algae blooms have blown through the best remaining habitat in the bay. The Model Lands (after the Miami Land and Development Co.) have been threatened by lousy development proposals (Lennar) and now, Florida Power and Light that wants to mine 10 million cubic yards of rock from wetlands in order to put its new nuclear power plants on raised beds, twenty five feet above Biscayne Bay, at the edge of Biscayne National Park.

The Miami Land and Development Co. built a shelter for use by the public at the entrance of the canal to the Bay. "I and friends of mine have spent nights in the Bay shelter and could not sleep because the silver mullet were so numerous in the Bay that when the predators, such as barracuda, porpoise and others, would chase them, the roar of the mullet leaping over the water was a constant riot." What a loss, to not be able to experience that.

Today, a few environmental groups-- Clean Water Action, Sierra Club, National Parks Conservation Association, Tropical Audubon, and Friends of the Everglades-- are fighting to protect and, hopefully, to restore what has been so badly damaged. If they have enough support from the community, they will stop Florida Power and Light. It is the latest great battle for Biscayne Bay.