by Naja and Arnaud Girard
In early December when water testing in Key West harbor showed off-the-chart numbers for fecal contaminants, the city rounded up the usual suspects: the boaters. Them again! Certainly they were polluting the harbor by not using mandatory holding tanks and new regulations for offshore liveaboards were swiftly introduced. But the data collected by The Blue Paper tells a very different story.
Between November 19 and December 3, the city conducted two weeks of testing in eleven different locations on the west coast of the island. The first striking observation is how irregular the results are. While there is barely a trace of fecal bacteria at the Westin Marina for instance, the numbers in nearby Key West Bight Marina were on several occasions greater than five times the “poor” threshold testing guidelines set by the state’s Healthy Beaches program and the Environmental Protections Agency (EPA). Likewise and bizarrely enough, even though the results in Key West Bight were abysmal for four to five days, they were, for the most part, acceptable during the rest of the two-week study period. So what is the source of such erratic water pollution?
According to the official explanation [as reported in the Key West Citizen] the floating community anchored offshore is responsible for the water pollution and the high level of fecal bacteria is due to the bad habits of a few liveaboard boaters who still refuse to use holding tanks and the free pumpout service provided by the County. But if such is the case, wouldn’t a bad habit of this nature create a routine, a routine that in turn would produce consistent results? After all, the use of toilets is hardly part of the ‘unpredictables in life’. So, why is the test data in the harbor so variable? Continue reading »