The fight is on over hefty fixes

Florida DEP asks Broward to create new disinfection process for its underground water treatment

Broward County’s way of treating its wastewater — the leftovers from sinks, toilets, showers and washing machines — needs fixes to make sure that polluted water doesn’t ever leak into our drinking water supply, the state says.

So the Florida Department of Environmental Protection is now asking the county to create a new disinfection process for its underground water treatment. The state is giving Broward five years to do it.

But the county says the changes, with an estimated price tag of $400 million, aren’t even necessary.

The DEP hasn’t showed any “definitive evidence” of a problem “and no one has alleged that there is any threat to current drinking water sources,” said Alan Garcia, the director for Water & Wastewater Services. “Broward County disagrees with the Department’s interpretation of the available monitoring data and there is no adverse impact on the public drinking water supply.”

Garcia said $400 million is the estimated cost of providing such a high-level disinfection treatment before the treated waste is shot

underground.

Broward and the state are now headed to court over the issue.

The trend of increasing chemicals in the groundwater means there could eventually be a problem, said Dan Early, of OriginClear, a Clearwater company that creates water treatment equipment.

Early is not involved in Broward’s spat with the state, but is an engineer for OriginClear.

“If ammonia makes its way, by groundwater movement, into those freshwater drinking supplies, that creates a burden on those people who need that water. That problem can migrate miles and miles away,” he said. “You do not want ammonia in your drinking water.”

In Broward, the first four wells were built between 1990 and 1992. Numbers five and six came onboard in 2002 and the last two were operational in 2017. For the last 10 years, the county “has regularly submitted extensive data, including groundwater quality data, for the Department’s review,” according to the lawsuit.

As the sides continue to argue about what the data really shows and what it means, experts say people just want to know their water supply is safe.

“They’ve got a very complex problem in front of them right now,” Early said. “There are no easy fixes. You don’t remedy stuff like that overnight.

“It took 20 years to create the problem, it can take 20 years to clean up the problem.”

Running deep underground

Broward County gets rid of its wastewater through “deep-well injection,” a process that calls for sending treated municipal sewage deep into rock formations that are about 3,000 below ground. This is far below the layer of fresh water that supplies drinking water. It eventually emerges clean as it passes through boulders and limestone.

The injection wells are at the North Regional Wastewater Treatment Plant on North Powerline Road in Pompano Beach.

State officials said there is a risk of “fluid migration” into the drinking water.

The state’s notification to the county in July reported that wells could cause the fluid to move into the brackish Lower Floridan Aquifer. “Increases in salinity, total Kjeldahl nitrogen, and ammonia in ... monitor wells lead to this conclusion,” the state’s letter reads.

The issue, according to Harold Wanless, professor in the Geology Department at the University of Miami, is that when the tainted water gets injected into the ground, it’s being injected into brackish water.

“They’re putting something into the ground you wouldn’t want to see again,” he said. But “it’s hard to put something in here and have it stay down. Because limestone is permeable, it’s porous, what you are putting in is less dense than the fluid already there so it wants to rise up.

“You don’t want it coming to the surface or anywhere near the surface because we use that water. You think you’re throwing it away and you’re not.”

Broward County said the drinking water is in no danger: Because the Lower Floridan Aquifer is a brackish aquifer that is not used for drinking water, “the conditions at the plant do not affect the health of any persons,” according to the county’s lawsuit.

A spokesman for the state’s Department of Environmental Protection would not comment, citing pending litigation.