Green Slime Nevermore! Stop Florida Nutrient Pollution

Sign ORI's Green Slime/Red Tide Letter Provide your comments for the EPA's rule to establish water quality standards for Florida, and to FL Governor to stop polluters from taxing downstream wildlife and people with their noxious waste.

Background

The most disgusting green water I had ever seen, worse than Boston beer on St. Patrick’s Day, was the green yuck sealed in a jar in Senator Bill Nelson’s Washington office. Long ago in ‘05, I and other ocean champions were meeting with the Florida Senator in support of his opposition to offshore drilling. But that jar of green which the former astronaut had scooped from the St. Lucie River grabbed my attention and never let go.

Now, in 2010, the EPA is taking actions to eliminate Florida’s green slime with a rule entitled “Water Quality Standards for the State of Florida’s Lakes and Flowing Waters.” This rule will set stringent limits on nutrient pollution allowed to foul Florida’s waterways. The state’s “vague narrative approach” to monitoring the effects of waste and fertilizer runoff will be replaced with clearly delineated caps on phosphorous and nitrogen levels in Florida’s lakes, rivers, streams, springs, and canals. Nutrient pollution contributes to algae blooms. Blooming algae takes up oxygen depriving and killing aquatic life. This causes respiratory problems and infections among boaters and beachgoers.

In Indian River Lagoon, North America’s most wildlife diverse estuary, about 15% of the resident bottlenose dolphins are suffering from nutrient pollution with skin-eating fungal infections. The increase in diseased dolphins happened during the 2005 St. Lucie algal bloom. Suffering continues because nutrient loading has not sufficiently decreased since that onslaught. Offshore dolphin populations are exhibiting skin-eating fungal infections as well.

Florida algal bloom cause fish kills both fresh water and salt. Increasing numbers of marine fish are covered with lesions.

Tell Florida to monitor waterways responsibly, to cap phosphorous and nitrogen levels. Tell EPA to aggressively regulate to reduce nutrient pollution which punishes us all.

ORI is compiling your letters for the EPA comment period and for FL Governor Crist. The Governor is considering bowing to a powerful coalition of agriculture and business interests to sue the EPA. The Governor would overturn a judge’s consent agreement allowing the federal government to set Florida’s water pollution standards. Industry interest groups are outraged that they should have to pay a “water tax” or else mend their polluting ways. This despite decades of their taxing of communities and wildlife with their nutrient-rich discharges that fouled up lakes and flowing waters with choking green slime. When their nitrogen and phosphates empty into FL waterways, fish, birds, marine mammals, fishermen, boaters, tourists and locals alike all suffer. Please, comment to the EPA and call on the Governor: No More Green Slime!

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