What Happens When There’s Not A Drop To Drink?

Citing the “delicate balance to be had in the Keys between public safety and property rights,” Gov. Rick Scott and the Florida Cabinet on Thursday voted to allow 3,550 new residential units to be built in Monroe over the next decade.

That lead paragraph in the Florida Keys Keynoter referred to the governor and cabinet’s worry about public safety but never mentioned an even more critical concern in the Keys: water.

Even though the population of the Keys has dropped over the last ten years and water consumption has also fallen by about one percent, the Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority continues to pump its maximum allotment of 17 million gallons of water every single day in the winter and 23 million gallons per day in the summer.

Imagine a swimming pool 267 feet long (almost as long as a football field), 50 feet wide, and 10 feet deep. That’s one million gallons. Multiply that by 17 and you might be able to visualize what the thirsty Keys consume every single day.

But it turns out that 17 million gallons isn’t enough. The Aqueduct supplements pumped water with even more from its relatively new, multi-million dollar Reverse Osmosis plant in Florida City. The facility converts sea water and so-called brackish water into the drinkable alternative. In February alone that plant converted 3,262,000 gallons of salty water into what we can use. FKAA pumped lesser amounts in the previous months including nearly a million and a half in January.

It’s a very expensive alternative.

“The production of the RO water is five times more expensive than the water that we pump,” said Kirk Zuelch, executive director of the Aqueduct.

The actual monetary cost of producing this water isn’t the only challenge that the Aqueduct Authority and Keys residents face when it comes to desalinated water. According to a long time Keys resident who has been involved in critical county issues, John Hammerstrom, running a desalination plant demands huge amounts of power.

“Producing water by reverse osmosis is also wasteful of energy,” he said. “There was not sufficient additional electric capacity within Monroe County to operate the new plant, so it was located closer to Turkey Point [nuclear power plant] in Miami-Dade County. According to the National Renewable Energy Lab, the energy required to deliver 1,000 gallons of reverse osmosis water is in the range of 10 to 15 kilowatt hours, depending on the concentration of salts, compared to 2 kilowatt hours to deliver 1,000 gallons of ground or surface water.”

And power consumption is also water consumption too. That’s because the additional power production required to produce this desalinated water is also water intensive. Electricity production requires massive amounts of water. In other words, just like using oil to produce oil, you need water to desalinate water.

Will Keys residents end up paying more for water?

If it costs five times more to produce 25 percent of our water, and the Keys add 8000 more residents, thereby adding to demand, it would seem that FKAA should increase the price of what it delivers to control demand and pay for its own increased costs.

Zuelch says that they won’t.

“Looking at that number of increased population we probably won’t have to raise rates, assuming that there’s a build out of that over time,” he said. “I would not expect that that would cause a rate raise.”

But FKAA doesn’t really want to reduce demand by raising rates because they make money by selling water. A residential customer pays just $5.57 per thousand gallons for the first 6,000 gallons of water, $8.14 per thousand for the next 6,000 gallons and $9.12 for the next 6,000 gallons.

“Thus, greater consumption means greater revenue to FKAA, and conversely, substantial water conservation and efficiency means less income,” Hammerstrom said.

A Threatened Water Supply

Zuelch acknowledges that a very real danger to our supply of the water flowing down from Florida City all the way to Key West is salt water intrusion of the well fields. As the Authority draws more and more water from the Biscayne Aquifer, there’s a potential for salt water to enter the system.

“The fresh water lens pulls back a little bit when we have less fresh water in the system and that allows the potential for salt water to come in and that’s the danger those of us in South Florida face,” Zuelch said.

In other words, the more the Keys draw down, the more likely it is that salt water will enter the aquifer. Complicating the issue even further is worry over sea level rise in very low-lying Florida. As the oceans rise it becomes an ever greater worry that oceans will intrude into what we need every day. While FKAA can pump 17 million gallons per day from an aquifer it could never supply enough water if the underground water were no longer available.

Limit development to limit water usage

Though FKAA has, in a rather passive way, encouraged water conservation by putting information on its website, and by offering cash for high volume toilet replacement, rainwater harvesting and septic-tank-conversions-to-non-potable-rainwater cisterns, these efforts are not well publicized. Currently the Keys are under water restrictions but very few people know this.

Key West resident Richard Boettger advocates a very different approach: limiting development by limiting water. He saw that in action during a visit to Bolinas, California.

“They have managed to keep the town as almost a time capsule and they did it with water restrictions,” he said. “What has stopped development in Bolinas for forty years has been making sure that the elected water board was not taken over by developers.”

Boettger supports electing people to the FKAA board, which doesn’t occur right now. Newly elected state rep Holly Raschein has introduced legislation to allow that in the Keys, replacing the currently appointed board but that bill faces a very uncertain fate, including a potential veto by Governor Rick Scott. Jeb Bush vetoed a similar bill some years ago.

Elected board or not, the Keys will have to face ever greater demands upon its water supply and, as climate change makes rainfall and sea level rise very uncertain, will at some point be forced to grapple with very, very serious challenges.