On April 20th, 2016 the Brevard Indian River Lagoon Coalition presented Save the Lagoon – A Call to Action. The standing room only crowd enthusiastically received speeches from community members addressing their concerns and love for the Indian River Lagoon. The keynote speaker at the event was Maggy Hurchalla.
Maggy Hurchalla is a lifelong advocate for wetlands preservation. She served for 20-years as a Martin County Commissioner, an active member of numerous Governor Commissions on the Everglades, water and planning, a winner of national, state and local environmental and conservation awards regarding wetlands, land planning, water studies.
Transcript of Maggy Hurchalla's speech:
WHAT TO DO?
We could wring our hands and blame Obama, but that won’t do any good.
We’ve made mistakes, what are we going to do about it?
We need to recognize that what happens in our waterways is all about the land around them and every drop of water that runs off that land. It is about the timing, the rate, the volume and the quality of runoff.
Some of the problem is about the sky above in the form of aerial deposition, but our ability at the local level to control coal fired power plants in China is limited. That will depend on international action on climate change.
When you vote this year, do ask candidates at every level if they believe in science and if they believe in climate change and rising sea level. If they don’t, don’t vote for them. It’s a bad time not to believe in science.
I’m going to spend a lot of time this evening emphasizing that there is not one single villain in this nightmare and not one single thing you can do that will make it all better.
That said, let me start with the two things you have to do if we are going to make a difference.
VOTE. If you are not registered to vote by Aug 1 in a party that stands a chance of winning in the November general election, you are not likely to have an influence on the result. Registering as a high minded Independent disenfranchises you in most Florida primary elections. Just voting is not enough. Find an honest, intelligent candidate who understands and cares about the Lagoon. If you can’t find one, you’ll have to run yourself. Make a campaign contribution, however small. Write letters to the editor. Ask your candidate what you can do to help. Complaining about the influence of money and negative campaigning won’t help. There are more of us than there are of them and if we all get involved we will make a difference..
BUY LAND. Runoff from the land is the key to the health of the Lagoon. Buying, restoring, and preserving native habitat is as close as we are going to get to playing God and guaranteeing a sustainable future and peaceful co-existence with the Earth. You get an idea of the importance of land use in terms of nutrient concentration in runoff when you look at the numbers. Runoff from natural wetlands has one fortieth of the phosphorous found in runoff from impervious urban areas or groves. If we take care of our natural lands, they will take care of us.
Those are the two general things we have to do.
The next set of generalities has to do with strategies that make a difference
1. CLOSE THE BARN DOOR. If the horses are loose and raising hell and it’s going to cost a whole lot to get them back in the barn, then for God’s sake close the barn door. If we know that high risk high density septic systems are going to fail and require sewer connections then it’s time to stop approving them for new development.
2. FUND RESEARCH AND MONITORING. Arguing doesn’t solve problems. Working from a realistic set of facts does. If you don’t know the facts or you don’t believe what you’re told, ask Edie or Duane. They’ll get you a credible answer. If we continue to refuse to spend the money to identify the problems, we will never solve them. We already know a lot of stuff and we are doing too much research on stuff know. We are not doing enough research on things we need to find out- like why did the 50,000 acres of seagrass die? Cold? Nutrients? Chemicals? Speculation gives us an hypothesis. Research gives us an answer that can keep bad things from happening again.
3. GO FOR THE LOW HANGING FRUIT. If it’s cheap and it’s quick and we’ve got strong evidence it will make a big difference, do it now. Don’t wait til you know all of the solutions to all of the problems and have enough money to address them all at once.
4. EDUCATE. I think it should be mandatory that all state and local politicians attend the third grade class at the local environmental center. Do not assume that everyone knows the most basic biological facts. Politicians are no worse than the people who elect them and all of us need to be involved in continuing education. Jim Moir gave me a wonderful example of a bit of knowledge that will make perfect lawn lovers much happier with summer fertilizer ordinances. A sizable portion of nitrogen entering the Lagoon comes from the sky. Lightning turns nitrogen in the air into a precipitate that rains down on lawns in summer thunderstorms. The same heavy rain that leaches artificial fertilizer into our waterways makes adding artificial fertilizer unnecessary in the summer wet season.
5. PROVIDE MODEL SOLUTIONS. The Kilroys have identified a golf course that is doing things right. They have achieved superior runoff and a great golf course at the same time. Pat them on the head and thank them. Use them as a model for all public golf course management.
In another example, we know that natural shorelines provide a whole slew of benefits to the estuary. Most people still believe that a seawall is the only way to stop erosion. Build some practical, cost effective, attractive models that show that vegetation can solve the problem. It’s a much better way to face rising sea levels.
If you can make “green Multiple Listing Service” work in Brevard real estate, show us how so we can copy you.
There are a whole lot of specific areas where we know the answers and need to act.
1. Drainage.
- Our stormwater rules for new development don’t adequately reduce nitrogen and other pollutants.. Phosphorous settles out with suspended solids in stormwater ponds. Nitrogen stays in the water column and goes into the aquifer or over the weir. This is a secret. We say that post development discharge equals pre-development discharge. That’s not true. We are committed to removing 80% of the problem. We don’t. The research has been done. Harvey Harper’s paper details the problem. We need to recognize it and do something about it. Since we have overlapping water management districts it would be useful for the National Estuaries Program to analyze Harper’s report; recommend new stormwater rules; and ask the water management districts to adopt themIf they won’t, then local governments should consider adopting them.
- Runoff from high intensity commercial use has more than 5 times the concentration of both nitrogen and phosphorous as low intensity residential. That needs to be addressed in new stormwater rules. We need to close the barn door or at least recognize that we are making the problem worse every time we approve a change to commercial land use.
- On a different note, most local governments have an open space requirement for new development. Most of that open space ends up as grass and adds to the problem. Preservation of native habitat on site is a valuable tool that needs to be used more. If you leave a patch of palmettos you don’t have to clear it and sod it and fertilize and mow it and spray ugly chemicals on it.
2. Sewage. There are 3 or 400,000 septic systems draning into the Lagoon from Palm Beach to Brevard. They don’t all have to be connected right now. First:
- We need to stop approving new ones that we know aren’t going to work. Close the barn door.
- We need to hook up- in priority order - the areas of high density and high water tables built under old standards that have been identified by the Health Department.
- We need to be able to enforce regular inspections and pump outs for those that depend on septic systems. Extending sewer lines to two acre lots doesn’t make sense. Making sure septic sytems work does make sense. In a fit of nerves about black helicopters in people’s back yards, the legislature withdrew the legislation they had passed earlier which would have required regular inspections statewide. While they were at it they made it illegal for local governments to require inspections and pump outs. We need to get our legislators to give local governments along the Lagoon the right to require inspections if they so choose. A properly functioning septic system adds some nitrogen to the aquifer and the nearest drainage ditch. A broken tank or drainfield adds raw sewage.
Septic isn’t the only sewage problem along the Lagoon.
- We need to ban new package sewer plants and connect existing ones where it’s possible and practical. Package plants can work in theory. They don’t work in practice.
- Local governments need to make sure that public and private utilities are maintaining their transmission systems. When Palm Beach County reviewed the sewer systems they had acquired in Glades’ communities, they found that 49% of the inflow to the plant in wet weather was from leakage into transmission pipes. When weather is dry, those pipes leak 49% of the raw sewage into the ground.
- Re-use of IQ water is a great idea. We used to think it was good that it had nutrients in it because it saved on fertilizer. We were wrong. Re-use of treated water to irrigate adds entirely too much nitrogen in the summer in the same way artificial fertilizer does. Recycling the problem of too much nitrogen is not the answer. The state standard for IQ water is 10mg./l. Sewer plants can get rid of nitrogen running a shallow column of water over an anaerobic substrate. Nitrogen bubbles off back to the air it came from. Levels can be reduced to 3 mg/l at very little cost. We need to educate, cajole, or coerce both public and private utilities to take that step, We also need to remember that when we pay for studies to track septic tank effluent by tracking Splenda, that we’re tracking IQ water as well.
The problem of biosolids is another unintended consequence of sewage disposal. We used to spread wet sludge from urban sewer plants over rural pastures. It was supposed to be tracked and monitored, but that clearly wasn’t working. Around 2010 they changed the rules. Now Class AA solids from sewage plants are dry instead of wet. They are diluted with mulch to reduce the concentrations of heavy metals and nutrients. Then they are deemed to be fertilizer and aren’t tracked and regulated anymore. We are now pretending there is no problem. In Florida, each year 300,000 dry tons of biosolids contribute 33 million pounds of nitrogen and 13.2 million pounds of phosphorus into our watersheds. Like the wet sludge, the utilities need to get rid of their pelletized biosolids come rain or shine. They give it away or sell it cheap. Again, if you do an expensive radioisotope study to prove that septic tanks are the main villain, you are including in the measurement runoff from “fertilized” pastures. We need to be shouting about this from the rooftops. It’s not YOUR sewage. It’s the sludge from big utban areas that need to get rid of their residuals.The huge amounts of biosolids currently being dumped in the region will haunt us for years to come as “legacy phosphorous” leaching back to the Lagoon. We need to find a solution for getting rid of urban sludge that doesn’t recycle it. The irony is that the utilities that brag about solving pollution problem by extending sewer lines and getting rid of septic systems are the fiercest lobby for unregulated sludge disposal.
3. Agriculture has a bigger impact on the Lagoon than urban development because the counties along the Lagoon have two or three times as much acreage in agricultural use as in urban use. Drainage systems for much of that agricultural development were put in place before we had rules about stormwater management. Agricultural runoff has high nutrient concentrations. Cows don’t use septic or sewer systems. In tropical Florida chemicals are a necessary part of growing crops.
All that doesn’t mean we should shoot farmers and stop eating. It does mean that we have got to get a whole lot better handle on how to fairly split the cost between property owners and taxpayers and bring about real improvement in ag runoff. We adopted a “polluter pays” amendment to the Florida Constitution in the 1990s. It is not enforced.
We need to figure out when to use carrots and when to use sticks. We know that mandatory BMPs with required monitoring of runoff have improved runoff in the EAA. We know that voluntary BMPs paid for by the taxpayers in the Northern Everglades haven’t worked. The state seems to be going backwards instead of forwards in finding solutionsto deal with ag runoff.. Here’s an area where regional research can find models that work and press the legislature to be allowed to implement them in the IRL watershed..
4. Chemicals. It’s easy and not irrational to get paranoid about chemicals. We can’t avoid them all. That said, there are things we know about and should avoid. We’ve become so used to spraying weeds instead of pulling them up, that not using Roundup is not considered feasible. Before you keep using it, before you ask your employees to keep using Round Up, I suggest you carefully read the most recent scientific studies on what it does to masculinity.
5. Whose Water It? Currently the residents of the state of Florida own the water on the ground and under it and it our waterways. We have the best of western and eastern water law. The legislature seems hell bent on privating Florida water. They’ve started doing it in an incremental fashion. Make them stop. If we privatize water we have lost the ballgame. If we give away what we have, we’ll never get it back.
A component of privatization is inter-basin transfer. It used to be unacceptable. Now it’s all the rage. The basin next door offers to take your excess water. It sounds plausible. The problem is that rainfall doesn’t differ sufficiently in Florida from basin to basin. You don’t have excess water when they need water. But once they habve a straw in your water source, they will want more of it than the water you don’t want. Once the connection is made they will be harder to dislodge than pythons from the Everglades.
Your tax dollars are now “studying” a scheme to move excess water from the St. Lucie Watershed up to citrus groves along the northern Indian River Lagoon. That will leave us with another wondrous recycling of the problem: Orlando doesn’t have enough water, so they need a connection to the St. Johns River.
Orlando has too much water, so it goes down the Kissimmee and gets dumped in Lake Okeechobee.
Then we run it down the St. Lucie Canal and divert it north because citrus along the St. Johns doesn’t have enough water. Note how we are running around in circles. The modeling’s been done. It shows it doesn’t work. But the project keeps on keeping on.
6. In the end, the biggest mistakes and the biggest insults to our Lagoon came about because we drained the swamps and the uplands around them. We dump lots more water off the land. We dump it in big slugs at the wrong time.
It’s been suggested that your problem up here is too little flushing and ours is too much. That oversimplifies.Don’t just concentrate on flushing more or flushing less. The problem is we got the water wrong, on volume, timing, rate, and quality.
Above all we need to get the water right.
You’d think we would have learned by now. First Lake Okeechobee went belly up; then Florida Bay turned pea green and all the sponges and sea grass died and they lost the bonefish fishery; then we had obscene lesioned fish in the St. Lucie in the a998 El Nino; then neon green slime where we couldn’t dip a toe in our estuary all summer long; and then brown tide, when absolutely everything died, including the horseshoe crabs. You’d think we would get the message.Enough is enough.
Edie Widder is fond of pointing out that if we want to solve the problem, we need to science the shit out it. We don’t need to do more studies on the scientific conclusions we’ve already documented. We need to translate what we know into persuasive and understandable solutions. We need to focus monitoring and research on things we need to learn.
Above all, we need to avoid finger pointing and glib answers and we need to work together.
If you get depressed at the lack of progress, remember when all the bait shops along the Lagoon had their privies out on the end of the dock. We are educable.
Remember there are more of us than there are of them. There lots more people who love the Lagoon than there are who hate it or just don’t care.
If we do what we know we have to do, we can get where we want to go.
LAND USE AND NUTRIENTS
http://141.232.10.32/pm/studies/study_docs/irl_south/pir_2004/AppendixA.pdf
Appendix A A 160
TABLE 2 LAND USE CATEGORY
TN and TP –total nitrogen and total phosphorous (kg/ha-yr))
Low density residential 6.00 0.77
Medium density residential 10.60 1.72
High density residential 19.80 4.43
Low intensity commercial 11.20 1.41
High intensity commercial 32.20 4.85
Industrial 18.10 3.15
Mining 5.50 0.69
Recreation/Open Space 2.80 0.12
Agriculture 10.60 1.36
Source: Woodward-Clyde Consultants (1994) The difference between total annual nitrogen
Appendix A A-248
Phosphorous Concentration in ppm
FOREST GROVE PASTURE IMPERVIOUS URBAN PERV. URBAN WETLANDS
.O3
4 ,338 .260 .322 .302 .008
file:///C:/Users/Janet/Downloads/harper_sw_design_2007.pdf
Evaluation of Current Stormwater Design Criteria within the State of Florida Evaluation of Current Stormwater Design Criteria within the State of Florida
Prepared for: Prepared for: Harvey H. Harper, Ph.D., P.E. David M. Baker, P.E. Harvey H. Harper, Ph.D., P.E. David M. Baker, P.E. Prepared By: Prepared By: 3419 Trentwood Blvd., Suite 102 Orlando, FL 32812 3419 Trentwood Blvd., Suite 102 Orlando, FL 32812 June 2007 June 2007
FLORIDA DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION FDEP Contract No. SO108 FLORIDA DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION FDEP Contract No. SO108
Final Report
Biosolids:
http://fl.audubon.org/news/disposal-sewage-sludge-lake-okeechobee-watershed-hurting-everglades-restoration
Disposal of Sewage Sludge in the Lake
Okeechobee Watershed Is
Hurting Everglades Restoration
While this focuses on the Okeechobee Watershed, the same applies to the Indian River Lagoon Watershed.
