Via The Washington Post: In Irma’s wake, millions of gallons of sewage and wastewater are bubbling up across Florida. Excerpt:
First Hurricane Irma blew through. Then the electricity went out. Then a work crew made an error while working on a pump station in the sewage system. And soon, 2,000 gallons of raw sewage was spilling onto a quiet residential street of ranch houses in Edgewater, a town south of Daytona Beach.
Benirose Demetita, administrator of Regency Elderly Care across the street, watched as city workers scrambled to contain the fetid mixture that spewed along Mango Tree Drive. “These guys from the city worked 24 hours trying to get that under control,” Demetita said.
The spill was one of scores of discharges of poorly treated wastewater and raw sewage into streets, lakes, rivers and neighborhoods, described in pollution filings that poured into the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
In one incident, the Miami-Dade Water and Sewer authority discharged six million gallons of partially treated wastewater — “secondary effluent” — into Biscayne Bay. Bloomberg News said pollution spills reported to the state of Florida totaled 9 million gallons by Tuesday, and that number has continued to grow in recent days.
While runoff from chemical plants and oil refineries dirtied waters along the Texas Gulf Coast, sewage and other wastewater has posed the most immediate problem in Florida, raising the risk of disease, triggering algae blooms that can suffocate fish and other marine creatures, and complicating cleanup days after Hurricane Irma moved north. “Even without hurricanes, the five U.S. Gulf Coast states are highly vulnerable to disease due to a unique mix of poverty, climate change and heat stress (the highest in North America), aggressive urbanization, and human migrations,” Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said in an email. “We are a global ‘hotspot’ for neglected tropical diseases. Now the hurricanes threaten to further amplify this problem.”
Because of its flat terrain, Florida relies heavily on wastewater lift stations with pumps to move sewage.
Those pumps require electricity. In 2012, the state required that pumping stations be able to withstand 25-year floods, or in some cases 10-year floods. But after Irma, electricity has been in short supply, with millions of customers cut off along with the sewage pump stations.
