February 13, 2015 – My wife and I are snow birds, Canadians who come south for part of the winter to escape snow, ice and the cold. When we get here there is one thing we don’t do. We don’t drink the water coming from the tap. Instead we buy bottled water and use it for making tea and for cooking. We’re not alone in doing this. Many Floridians have become accustomed to doing the same thing. The reason is Florida’s freshwater just doesn’t cut it for drinking. It doesn’t taste right and it hasn’t for a very long time.
Most of Florida’s drinking water, nearly 90%, comes from underground aquifers. Deep wells tap the aquifer for South Florida‘s large urban communities. On top of that South Florida gets over 150 centimeters (about 60 inches) rainfall annually. Those who manage the freshwater supply will tell you that keeping homes from getting flooded by freshwater each year remains a challenge in itself.
Much of the South Florida population resides on reclaimed Everglades’ land, land that normally would be a freshwater swamp. Residential areas here are peppered with lakes, lagoons and drainage ditches. Where we are staying close to the beach it rained last week and even here the water ponded on our street. So it would seem that with so much freshwater there should be no problem at all. But that is not the case. South Florida is booming in population. Water demand is increasing. And the wells that tap the aquifer are under siege.
Why? Take a look at the picture below. This is the rock that contains South Florida’s groundwater. It is a porous limestone. Normally one would think that rock like this would soak up freshwater like a sponge. But in fact the limestone is too easily penetrated by water. Any type of water. And that includes seawater.
You see South Florida faces another problem where seawater comes into the picture. Sea levels continue to rise off the Florida coast and the trend is accelerating. Add to that the growing freshwater demand on the aquifer and you have a perfect storm with seawater displacing freshwater in the underground aquifers of the state.
The limestone aquifer has never been a barrier to seawater. There has always been salt water in the aquifer. It just lay further down because its specific gravity is heavier than the freshwater which flowed above. But rising seas means that below ground salt water is getting closer to the surface.
So it isn’t just storm surges off the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico that threaten South Florida. The entire ocean as sea levels rise remains a threat. The salt water is moving both inland and upward, see illustration below, contaminating all those sunk wells dug decades ago and used by municipalities to provide drinking water.
So what’s in the cards for South Florida over the next few decades. Climatologists in studying current trends forecast a mean sea level rise of between 7.6 and 30 centimeters (3 to 12 inches). Flooding already on the increase will only get worse after heavy rains, storm surges and high tides. The water table in South Florida will creep closer to the surface posing an additional threat to homes and buildings. And of course as the water table rises salt water intrusion will further contaminate freshwater supplies.
For South Florida’s cities this is a train wreck happening at an ever increasing speed. Getting city, state and federal heads looking at the problem remains an enormous challenge. Recently I wrote about how the City of Miami Beach is addressing rising sea levels. With a limited tax base the city government has chosen to fund a storm deflection project by issuing permits to build 47 new beachfront condominium projects. Just south of us here in Fort Lauderdale, a $11.8 million US project is rehabilitating Highway A1A after a huge storm surge generated by Hurricane Sandy in late October 2012 led to the subsequent collapse of a four-block section of the roadway. But the new storm drains and slightly raised sea wall will do little to stop what is foreecast two decades hence.
So what do you do when you have millions of people living in the Greater Miami-Fort Lauderdale area with a disaster scenario creeping towards them centimeter by centimeter? Well if you are government it appears you do the least amount and the wrong things to boot until the “shit hits the fan.”
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Back in 1966 I worked in the Apollo Program and lived in Titusville, Fla., near the Indian River right outside Kennedy Space Center. Those were yahoo years when I would invest way too much time investigating highly improbable propositions. At the time, I wanted to fully settle in my mind the question of whether there exists any sort of supernatural continuum in which ideas might come into one’s mind without input from the actual material world. Is there anything at all, other than schizophrenic self-delusion and subjective imagination, behind the phenomena of Ouija Board, mind reading, fortune telling, channeling, spirit writing, pre-cognition, remote viewing,
dowsing, telekinesis, etc? I was skeptical in the extreme, but not so skeptical that I refused to waste time investigating reports from otherwise credible persons. I heard of a very idiosyncratic 70-year-old geezer, Mr. A. T. Anderson, who lived with his lifelong wife out in the swamp about ten miles inland near Malabar Fla. See: http://www.aberree.com/v06/n09p11.html
He had no phone service, so I drove unannounced down a long dirt road out to his place to hear what he had to say. He recounted a strange schizophrenic tale of a lifetime of seeing spirits and hearing spirit-guide voices, which he alone could see and hear.
During the 1930s depression, he had been a itinerate hobo traveling the country on rail freight cars, that is until his spirit guide directed him to the Chicago YMCA, where as the spirit had promised, he found immediate employment as a swimming instructor. Soon, a wealthy young woman showed up with her kid brother to learn how to swim. It’s unclear whether the kid ever learned to swim, but it was fairly clear Anderson’s spirit-guide told him to marry the woman, to whom he was still lovingly married and living with out in the South Florida swamps. Other than having spent most of her adult life living in the swamp with A.T. Anderson, and providing nearly the sole financial
support for the family and various bizarre swamp excavation enterprises, she seemed completely and pleasantly sane. According to Anderson, his spirit guide instructed him to move with his new bride from Chicago to South Florida and buy a particular 100-acres of nearly worthless swampland. The spirit guide promised Anderson that he could unearth important archeological remains of ancient civilizations. So Anderson and his wife moved to Fla. and spent most of the next 45-years digging hundreds of water-filled pits in the swamp. Amidst the pits the property was littered with long-dead derelict steam shovels and rusting steam-powered dragline cranes and tractors. http://www.aberree.com/v06/n09p11.html
While he offered no compelling provenance, Mr. Anderson displayed large numbers of ancient teeth and bones from marine mammals and hominids ostensibly excavated from his swampland. The whole property seemed full of marine shells, and ancient Indian pottery shards, suggesting strongly that in the past it had been submerged under the ocean. Of particular interest were the mysterious three-times oversize hominid skulls. Mr. Anderson asserted that the giant skulls were that of an extinct race of ancient hominids. His spirit guides were the spirits of ancient dead Indians, and they advised him where to dig and what he would find.
Naturally, I was profoundly skeptical and asked if he was in constant communication with dead Indian spirit guides. He answered yes, and that he was in communication with them at that very moment. I asked if the spirits knew what lay below the surface all over his property. He said certainly they know. So I asked, “You mean I could walk out anywhere on your property with a shovel, and you could ask your dead Indian spirits what I would dig up at any place of my choosing, and then that’s what I would dig up?
To my surprise he said, “Sure. Let’s get a shovel and we can
go wherever you like. My invisible spirit guides will tell me what you will dig
up and at what depth.”
We spent the next couple of hours slopping through the swamp with me leading the way to make seemingly arbitrary selections of where to dig. In 20 of my random location selections, Mr. Anderson said if you dig there you will find nothing of interest within three-feet of the surface. Sure enough, I dug three holes that as predicted uncovered nothing, and decided it was pointless to dig where Anderson said nothing would be found. I must have selected and dug 15 test holes where a prediction of what would be found was made. He was 100% dead right in predicting what would be found in the 15 test holes randomly located hundreds of yards apart from each other. Common sense dictates that is statistically impossible.
Had Anderson “salted” has swamp with hundreds of thousands of artifacts over the last 45 years, and then remembered with a natural GPS in his brain what was buried under 4,300,000 square feet of overgrown swampland? I dug up nothing remarkable
per se, just bones, sharks’ teeth, or shards, or shells, or pieces of stone. But the 100% accuracy rate of his predictions was totally inexplicable by any science within my understanding.
When I returned home in puzzlement I was sure of several things. A.T. Anderson was weird as hell. In the not too distant past, South Florida had been submerged under the ocean. A.T. Anderson’s dead Indian spirit guides were totally invisible to nearly everyone except himself. I had no plausible conjecture to explain how Mr. Anderson seemed to know what was buried under every square foot of his 100 acres.
[…] often the source of drinking water in cities are increasingly under threat as saltwater invades. In South Florida, cities like Fort Lauderdale and Miami in search of freshwater are tapping the inland aquifers of […]