Water Fall
At a BCC workshop today (Nov. 20, 2007) Mr. Kirby Green with the St. Johns River Water Management District made a presentation about the state of the water supply in Florida. My eyes were opened - wide, and my head was spinning. Pretty scary stuff. Like many growth related infrastructure issues, the numbers and the details can be mind numbing, but you don't have to be an engineer or a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon or anything else to imagine turing on a faucet and nothing coming out. In the service area of the SJRWMD, the average per-person use of publicly supplied water is 150 gallons per day, or about 6.25 gallons per hour. WOW! Several points made today stick out in my mind. No opinion, just sharing. This water issue must be studied, and resolved scientifically. As difficult as it will be, it needs to be dealt with with logic and reason, not emotion. Desalination will be part of the future of potable water supply for Florida. Apparently, so will pumping water out of the St. Johns and Ocklawaha Rivers. Some 'Fast Facts' from a SJRWMD newsletter: Most of the water currently used in the district comes from ground water. Fresh groundwater alone will not be able to meet all future water supply needs through 2025. About 200 million gal. per day of alternative supplies are likely to be needed in east-central Florida. Sixty alternative water supply project options have been identified to meet these needs. As with all of the infrastructure issues, population growth is the cause of the problem. In 1995 (the base year for Water Supply Assessment projections) the District population was 3.5 million people. In 2025, projected population will be 5.9 million, a 67% increase. Water use is projected to go from 1.4 billion gpd (1995) to about 1.8 billion gpd (2025), a 30% increase. Mr. Green stated that the #1 consideration with regard to water usage and sourcing is the environment. I found that reassuring - sort of. I couldn't help but imagine some science fiction sort of future where the millions of people in Florida are in a life and death struggle for fresh drinking water. Kind of makes crowded roads seem like a pretty minor thing. Time to go take a shower. www.sjrwmd.com Related: Baxley's blog | login or register to post comments | printer friendly version | Tags: St. Johns River | water
Submitted by ex-oficio on Wed, 11/21/2007 - 7:55am.
You are dead on the money , and many times the numbers that are thrown at us are totaly false with no back-up. No doubt our demand is increasing but limiting growth may be the only answer. YOU CAN'T PUT 10 GALLONS OF WATER IN A 5 GALLON BUCKET People are talking about ...Here are the recent blog postings with the most comments. |
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Baxley - thanks for the update on the meeting today. I was hoping to be there but had to work. Please keep in mind that the SJRWMD has not necessarily supported the environment, but mainly developers. I attended a meeting of CAN where a geologist representing SJRWMD attempted to explain why it would be necessary to divert water from the St. Johns River, but couldn't answer many questions from some very informed attendees, about the effect it would have, or what the desalination of the water, and the waste (non-management) would do when all that salt was put back in a different form than it was originally taken from the river. The environment? SJRWMD is not looking out for the environment - that is not their job. Their job is to snowball the public into thinking they are looking out for our best interest. They are government funded so that alone should indicate which side their bread is buttered on.
PLEASE log on to the St. Johns Riverkeepers website, www.stjohnsriverkeepers.org and check out all the information on their site, including latest updates, and the many links to information including conservation, http://watercrunch.blogspot.com/2007/04/what-everybody-ought-to-know-about.html.
Call me cynical - it's one of my middle names, along with sarcasm, but any agency who grants 94% of permits requested no matter how much damage or where the wetlands are, is not looking out for the environment. The Army Corp of Engineers' Florida headquarters are in Jacksonville and they are equally offensive to the environment as they grant permits for anything and everything (can you picture New Orleans and the fine job the Army Corp has done there?). The SJRWMD speaks with forked tongue. It's simple to research. Angela?? (you are terrific at this).
I just wish that 40 years ago I had purchased that swampland in Florida that was constantly being offered to us yankees.
Sincerely,
A Day Late and a Dollar Short