Out of the pipe, into the ocean

After the toilet flushes, it’s the treatment plants’ problem. But what do you do with sewage from 6 million South Floridians?

Some of it gets recycled to places such as golf courses. Some gets injected into underground wells. As for the excess? Most South Florida wastewater treatment plants have flushed it through pipes about 1 to 3 miles offshore since the 1970s.

Treatment plants disinfect the sewage before it heads to the ocean, but leave behind concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorous, according to the Department of Environmental Protection.

Though the nutrients do not pose a direct threat to humans, the chemical cocktail of partly treated human waste feeds algal blooms that form thick green mats of seaweed, said Brian LaPointe, Florida Atlantic University research professor at the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute.

Florida’s coral reefs, the third-largest barrier reef system in the world, are being smothered like hash browns, but not in melted cheese.

The seaweed smothers coral and washes up on South Florida’s beaches, he said. LaPointe, who has been monitoring the reefs since the early 1980s, has watched coral populations dwindle from 80 percent reef cover to just 4 percent, he said.

“The concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorus on the reef right now are too high for healthy coral growth,” LaPointe said.

Florida’s 360-mile-long reef is a natural masterpiece that acts as a protective barrier and a marine nursery. It’s also an economic engine that drives tourism and commercial fishing estimated to generate $1.9 billion for South Florida each year, according to a 2006 Department of Environmental Protection report.

The partially treated sewage is one of many stressors contributing to the coral’s decline. Others include rising ocean temperatures, dredging, and farm and lawn runoff.

Lawmakers used LaPointe’s research and others’ as the foundation for the law that called for ending the regular use of the pipes. Saunders filed the legislation during his last term in office in 2008 while serving as the Senate’s environmental committee chairman.

It was a fairly easy sell, Saunders said.

“It was something that really was the right thing regardless of whether it had a direct impact on people,” Saunders said. “You just cannot dump that much polluted water into the ocean every day and not have some localized impacts.”

Samuel Falcon, 25, who teaches diving, was the last of his dive group to enter the waters off Pompano Beach last fall. He dropped into a big, brown plume of freshwater. “I was confused until I saw it,” he said.

There, about 100 feet underwater, he found the 4 opening of Broward County’s northern outfall pipe, Falcon said.

Inside the opening sat a goliath grouper — likely looking to make a meal of the fish that often swarm the cloud, he said.

“If we were to take customers, they would give us an earful about how gross it was,” Falcon said. “Your impression is it’s filthy water being introduced to the reef environment.” face their own sets of challenges: Large service populations, saltwater intrusion and aging sewer systems have made it more difficult and more expensive to end use of the pipes.

Miami-Dade estimates it will cost about $5.7 billion to comply with the legislation, according to a 2016 compliance plan update. Most of the funding will come from bonds and loans, but utility customers can expect to pay off the debt through periodic rate increases, according to the report.

Broward’s two outfall pipe operators — one in Pompano Beach and the other in Hollywood — estimate it will cost them $100 million each.

In Hollywood, saltwater leaks into small cracks in its aging sewer system, making it difficult for the wastewater treatment plant to reuse as much water as other plants, said Steve Joseph, Hollywood’s director of public utilities.

Complying with the regulations is a balancing act between meeting requirements and hiking utility rates, Joseph said.

“That’s one of the things we’ve been trying to let the folks at Tallahassee know. Every one of us wants to try and do the right thing, but at the end of the day, you are a utility,” Joseph said. “At the end of the day, you are going to have people choking because you have to raise rates.”

Hollywood plans to conduct a study to determine whether, or by how much, the utility would need to raise rates to comply with the law, said Joann Hussey, a city spokeswoman.

Miami-Dade has similar problems, but bigger.

The Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department is the largest in the southeast United States, serving about 2.3 million people, said Jennifer Messemer-Skold, Miami-Dade spokeswoman.

Every day, Miami-Dade’s pipes dump about 151 million gallons into the ocean, she said.

To meet the 2025 deadline, the plant plans to build a fourth wastewater treatment plant for about $350 million, said Hardeep Anand, the department’s deputy director.

Additionally, the county plans to build 25 deep-injection wells by 2025, he said.

Treatment plants in Broward have similar plans to build four more wells to meet the deadline. Most wells store the partially treated sewage at least 3,000 feet underground, below aquifers used for drinking water.

“From a regular person’s standpoint, as consumers we tend to take things for granted,” Anand said. “When you flush your toilet, the water magically disappears.”

Plants can discharge for other reasons, too, including excess flows from heavy rains.

But the occasional discharge doesn’t really bother Ed Tichenor, whose research was also used to help pass the 2008 legislation.

Tichenor, director of Palm Beach County Reef Rescue, said there’s a difference between the occasional use and dumping millions of gallons every day.

“It degrades the environment. However, to be realistic, they closed the outfall and are only using it under certain circumstances, which are written into the permit,” he said. “The reefs are in much, much better condition since the [Boynton/Delray] outfall was closed.”

Some scientists disagree about the impact that such a quantity of wastewater has had on the marine habitat relative to other threats, such as dredging, rising ocean temperatures and agricultural runoff.

Fred Bloetscher, an associate professor of civil engineering at Florida Atlantic University, said it’s easy to blame the pipes, but they are not the top contributors.

“I think it’s reasonable if we are going to spend those billions, how are we going to get the best bang for our buck?” Bloetscher said.

Still, LaPointe said reducing the concentration of nutrients and closing the pipes give coral a fighting chance.

“The rules are there to phase out those outfalls by 2025. Once that is done these waters are going to clean up, but don’t forget there are more people moving to Florida all the time.”