So far in our podcast, Central Florida Seen & Heard: Rising Water Part Two, we’ve explored how Florida’s land and water are interconnected. We’ve seen how conserving land, particularly floodplain and wetlands, helps reduce flooding.
Now, in the final installment of our podcast, we’re exploring another critical water connection: the connection between water quantity, and water quality in Central Florida.
RELATED: Rising Water: Build, drain, flood
The way water cycles through our world shows us how ultimately, it is all connected. Water falls from clouds in the form of rain, snow or hail, and it evaporates into the atmosphere from surface waters, like lakes and oceans.
Water is also stored beneath the ground in aquifers, like the ones supplying drinking water to 90% of people in northeast and east-Central Florida. Rain recharges, or replenishes, Florida’s freshwater aquifers.
But too much rain can also create problems: like flooding, which in itself can lead to water quality and contamination concerns.
In a small Astor neighborhood right on the St. Johns River, four days after Hurricane Milton, resident Bill Barney tried his best to avoid stepping in the several inches of floodwater still engulfing his street. Although he’d seen the neighborhood flood other times since Barney moved here in 1992, this time was a bit different, he said.
“Usually, it goes away quick,” Barney said. This time though, the water lingered for days after the storm, still making backyards disappear into the St. Johns River right behind Barney’s house.
But the flooding inside Barney’s home didn’t come from the river itself, he said.
“It's not like the water came in the house,” Barney said. “The water came into the house through the toilets … It just blew the seals out of the toilet.”
Next door to Barney, Rich Williams had the same problem, for what he said was the first time in his 13 years of living in the neighborhood: sewage spilling out from under one of his toilets. Williams, who said he previously worked as a licensed master plumber, wrangled a temporary solution, using a plug to stop the waste from spewing out.
“Otherwise, it would be flowing out of there,” Williams said.
The Florida Government Utility Authority owns and operates “Jungle Den,” the small wastewater system serving about 143 connections in the neighborhood. It’s called a package plant: a wastewater treatment facility designed for smaller communities that is pre-assembled, then transported to the service site.
Heavy rains from Hurricane Milton submerged parts of Jungle Den, including its lift stations. Lift stations are often necessary to move sewage to treatment facilities in Florida, versus gravity alone, due to the state’s generally low elevation.
“Any time that you have a lift station submerged, you're gonna have issues with the flow of sewage,” said John Nieves, Assistant Community Service Manager for FGUA. And since the Jungle Den system sits at a very low point, it is especially vulnerable to flooding, Nieves said.
During and in the days following Milton, FGUA responded to calls from customers reporting sewage backups into their homes, like Williams and Barney. But FGUA didn’t report those backups to a higher authority, like the Florida Department of Environmental Protection — because it wasn’t required to, Nieves said.
“That's not considered a contamination,” Nieves said. “It is, I understand, in the person's home. I mean, obviously it's not sanitary. But … it doesn't fall under the [FDEP] guidelines where we need to notify them for a contamination, if you will.”
Spills of more than 1,000 gallons of untreated sewage must be reported to the State Watch Office within Florida’s Division of Emergency Management, as well as “other abnormal events where information indicates that public health or the environment will be endangered, or the spill has reached surface waters,” according to FDEP.
But until a sewage spill meets that threshold, posting a Public Notice of Pollution is optional, and FDEP doesn’t guarantee the accuracy of any notices submitted to the portal. The last time a notice of pollution was submitted for Jungle Den was in 2017.
Additionally, the sewage backing up into Astor homes was just that: a backup, not a spill, Nieves said.
“If there was a sewer backup in someone’s home, then it wouldn’t be a contamination,” Nieves said, adding that sewer backups can occur for many reasons, like roots growing in pipes, for example.
Across the U.S., hundreds of water bodies are chronically contaminated, many of them from aging sewer infrastructure, according to Valerie Harwood, a microbiologist and professor of Integrative Biology at the University of South Florida.
In her lab, Harwood and her students study sewage, looking at the DNA of bacteria in water to determine whether sewage contamination is present, and where it came from.
“A lot of times, you can't even see the stuff that's going to hurt you,” Harwood said. “Fecal contamination — at a level where there's enough pathogens, enough disease-causing microorganisms to make people sick — that doesn't necessarily change the color or the odor of the water.”
Even though we can’t always see it, sewage contamination in the environment is a big problem, Harwood said.
“It's a bit out of sight, out of mind: as long as there's no sewage bubbling up to the surface, it tends to go under the radar, so to speak,” Harwood said. “But that sewage is still percolating.”
Flooding can overwhelm wastewater systems, causing sewage to overflow.
“The systems, they can't handle it,” Harwood said. “If that rainwater is coming in at a great rate, it's creating a huge amount of flow into that system, and now the wastewater has nowhere to go but out, in a heck of a hurry.”
FDEP administers penalty fines for wastewater violations, including unauthorized wastewater discharges, with base fines ranging from $750 to $15,000, depending on the severity of the violation, according to an agency manual.
But FDEP also authorizes some wastewater discharges into surface waters, like lakes, under certain conditions. And Harwood said there’s a reason why lift stations are often right next to a waterbody, like a retention pond or a creek: if the lift station fails, due to a power outage or flooding, the sewage still must go somewhere.
“Although we certainly don't want to chronically release large amounts of sewage, if it has to happen, it's better that it goes into a waterbody and gets diluted and carried off, rather than going directly into places where people live and work and shop,” Harwood said.
Hurricane Milton delivered 18 inches of rain to parts of Volusia County: “record levels,” Nieves said, only exacerbating flood risk for the Astor neighborhood right near the Volusia-Lake County border — and its wastewater treatment system — which both sit at a low point.
Still, he’s never seen the small wastewater system become so overwhelmed, besides during Hurricane Ian, Nieves said. System upgrades already planned prior to Milton will soon be underway, including a brand-new lift station that will sit at higher elevation, Nieves said.
After the upgrades, “it’s less likely that we'll have this issue,” Nieves said. “I can't say we won't, because if there is again, major flooding, it still could occur. But it'll definitely improve it to where it's less likely.”
Following the night of October 9, when the Jungle Den system became overwhelmed, FGUA staff used bypass pumps as a temporary fix, pumping sewage between manholes to move it to different lift stations, Nieves said.
Williams was finally able to flush his toilet again October 16, he said. But the wastewater system did not get fully back up and running until October 28, according to Nieves.
“Although we certainly don't want to chronically release large amounts of sewage, if it has to happen, it's better that it goes into a waterbody and gets diluted and carried off, rather than going directly into places where people live and work and shop."Valerie Harwood, Professor of Integrative Biology, University of South Florida
Wastewater infrastructure doesn’t tend to be top of mind for many of us, Harwood said: it’s not something people tend to enjoy talking about, and when our own toilets seem to be working fine, it can be tough to understand why expensive infrastructure improvements are necessary.
Yet sewage contamination is a critical issue, as Florida officials recognize: state laws passed in 2021 require local governments to analyze their wastewater and stormwater facilities, and plan for future resiliency needs.
“If you get a chance to vote for or talk about the need to provide better [wastewater] infrastructure, then it's in all of our best interests, and in the environment's best interest, to do it: to fund that sort of improvement,” Harwood said.
