Sweet samples shows sour truth: Sewage injected beneath Florida Key is bubbling back up

There’s an old saying, one that’s often brought up when Florida men fire off their guns to celebrate New Year’s: What goes up must come down. Look out for those falling bullets, boys!

But when it comes to Florida wastewater, I think the reverse is true: What goes down must come up.

I say this after chatting with Don DeMaria, president of Friends of the Lower Keys, or FOLKS for short. DeMaria, a commercial diver who runs a company called Sea Samples, told me a disturbing story about what’s been happening with the waste that a Key West company has been injecting underground. The folks from FOLKS have been trying to warn everyone about it.

Key West Resort Utilities has been shooting its treated waste from Stock Island down into shallow wells. But the effluent isn’t staying where it’s put. It’s flowing out to the nearest waterway, which in a nice irony is known as “Safe Harbor.”

DeMaria’s organization put a camera underwater. Its images show the effluent bubbling back up from underground. Even worse is what happens then.

The camera captured images of manatees. That would be nice except they’re flocking to drink the treated sewage from where it’s spurting from the seabed. Treated sewage still contains nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, as well as micro-plastics, forever chemicals, and discarded pharmaceuticals. Not exactly the ideal sports drink: “Poopy-ade! Helps you stay stronger for longer!”

To add to the irony, the place where this is happening is part of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.

“It’s a mess,” DeMaria told me.

A year ago, FOLKS sent a lengthy letter about this problem to state and federal officials, including several from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.

“Water quality degradation, particularly an excess of nutrients, is an important cause of declines in the abundance, distribution, and species composition of coral reefs and seagrass beds in the Florida Keys,” the letter pointed out.

Twelve months later, no one has taken any action to fix the poopy problem.

Perhaps this shouldn’t be a surprise, because the contamination is a legacy of a long-ago Monroe County political scandal.

The scandal involved a crooked county commissioner, a grand jury investigation, kickbacks, tax evasion, and a political consultant who was listed in the phone book as “The Prince of Darkness.”

Payoffs and the ‘prince’

Key West’s name came from the exotic Spanish description of Cayo Hueso — island of bones. The origin of Stock Island’s name is apparently more prosaic. It’s where the settlement’s livestock were kept.

But in the past 50 years it’s people who have been herded into the Keys like cattle, putting a serious strain on the natural resources that attracted them. Dealing with the residents’ basic needs is tricky, because there’s no place in the island chain to draw fresh water or dump sewage.

Drinking water is piped from the mainland more than 125 miles away. To show how perilous that journey can be, in 2024 there were three consecutive breaks in the fresh water main in one month.

The question of what to do with the sewage is even, ummm, messier.

At first, Keys sewage went into thousands of septic tanks, many of which leaked into the waterways. Builders insisted that the fecal material in the water wasn’t the result of any human error, said Brian LaPointe, a Florida Atlantic University scientist who’s been studying the Keys wastewater problem for decades.

“They’d say, ‘Oh, it’s those darn manatees pooping in the water,’” LaPointe told me. He figured out how to use chemical tracers to show that the source was us humans, not wildlife.

By the 1990s, every tide carried to shore signs of the septic tank leakage. Pollution became a major threat to the $2 billion fishing and tourism economy.

To replace septic tanks, Monroe County built sewer plants. Stock Island property owners complained about the one the county built there. County officials had promised the cost of hookups would be one thing, but the reality turned out to be higher.

That led to a 2004 grand jury investigation of the sewer system’s builder, KWRU, owner of the Stock Island golf course. The family-owned company had been paid more than $4 million for its construction work.

How did a golf course company land a sewer contract? According to the grand jury, it had an inside man. A county commissioner named Jack London had been taking payoffs from KWRU — $2,500 a month from 1998 to 2003.

Because you can’t have a scandal in Florida without some quirky angle, London insisted all payoffs (there were others) be funneled through a Miami political consultant. The consultant was so proud of his diabolical skills that he listed himself in the phone book as “the Prince of Darkness.”

In 2004, FBI agents arrested London at the Key West airport before he could board a flight to Ireland. He later pleaded guilty to tax evasion, then had a stroke and died. The grand jury report noted that the county never recovered from KWRU the $147,500 it paid to London.

Here’s the most amazing part of the grand jury report. Once KWRU completed building the Stock Island plant, the county simply handed over the keys.

Even though the taxpayers paid to build the plant, they never owned it. Instead, it became the property of KWRU.

The grand jury said several experts testified “it was unprecedented … to have a public project funded by public monies turned over to a private entity.”

A side of stink

The Keys sit atop limestone, which has more holes than a dozen boxes of Krispy Kreme donuts.

Yet somehow, Keys sewer plants got permission to inject their treated effluent into shallow wells. The assumption is that the effluent will stay underground, “contained within the aquifer zone” as one scientific report put it.

“It’s a common practice in the Keys,” LaPointe told me. “‘Oh, let’s just inject it down to 90 feet!’ But because it’s freshwater, it’s buoyant and so it wants to rise and it DOES rise. It pops right back up within 24 hours.”

Holy geology, Batman! Is it any wonder the ca-ca contained in these wells leaks out?

The first clue something was wrong with the Stock Island plant was the smell. A couple blocks from the plant, DeMaria said, is a seafood restaurant that’s popular because Jimmy Buffett once ate there. Diners who order the special sometimes get a side of stink at no extra charge.

“When the wind comes out of the north, the odor of fecal matter is strong at this restaurant,” DeMaria told me. He said a joke going around says this is one seafood joint where you can smell your food both before AND after you eat it.

There’s an easy way to tell if what’s bubbling up from below is human waste: Test it for the presence of artificial sweetener.

That sugary chemical — it’s called “sucralose” — does not occur anywhere but in human waste, LaPointe told me. And like discarded pharmaceuticals, forever chemicals, and other pollutants, sewage treatment fails to screen it out. Find sucralose and you’ve found human poo.

FOLKS hired a scientist named Matt Finn to locate the spots where the effluent was flowing and take samples. About 300 feet from the sewer plant’s shallow wells, Finn found five “upwellings” producing effluent packed with sucralose.

He also found manatees sipping from this outrageous outflow. Turns out they didn’t like him getting between them and their not-so-fresh water.

“This manatee pushes me out of the way to get to the upwelling,” Finn told me. “And I thought, ‘Wow, that’s crazy!’”

The stuff that’s been coming up in Safe Harbor doesn’t stay there, by the way.

“There is a strong body of scientific evidence showing that the system of ocean currents, counter currents, and eddies connects the entire Florida Keys region,” a marine ecologist named Sarah Frias-Torres told me. “This work was done mainly to understand how coral larvae can disperse throughout the Keys. But the same knowledge can be applied to how pollutants in the water column can disperse throughout the Keys.”

FOLKS alerted KWRU about what was happening. The utility’s attorney sent several members of the environmental group a cease-and-desist letter warning them to stop trespassing on the golf course (they didn’t) and also stop “making false and libelous statements.”

DeMaria said the utility was “grasping at straws trying to stop us.”

A bad idea

FOLKS has been through this before.

The environmental group has already taken on two other utilities over their sewer leaks. One was the Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority, which was using shallow wells at its facility on Cudjoe Key. The other was the City of Marathon, which also relied on shallow wells.

Both had upwellings of waste similar to the ones occurring at Stock Island, DeMaria said. Both refused to make any changes until FOLKS sued them under the Clean Water Act. Both wound up settling with FOLKS and agreeing to sink far deeper wells.

“It seems like people here are always scared to do anything until they get sued,” DeMaria said.

I contacted KWRU about its sewer system being leakier than a worn-out collander.

“Unfortunately, the utility cannot comment further due to the litigious nature of FOLKS,” said Christopher Johnson, the son-in-law of the company’s founder.

But as a rebuttal to what FOLKS has been saying, Johnson sent me the 2016 decision from an administrative law judge. The judge ruled against a different environmental group that sued over a KWRU permit.

To accommodate the Keys’ booming growth, KWRU wanted to expand its facility. Of course, that would mean injecting more effluent underground. DEP signaled it would approve the permit, so an environmental group called Last Stand sued to stop it.

The hearing officer ruled that Last Stand failed to prove its accusations about the KWRU sewer plant contaminating the local waterways.

I called up Last Stand’s former president, Ann Olsen of Summerland Key, about this. She  blamed the loss on the fact that they could not prove the sewage in the Stock Island waterway came from KWRU.

Now the legal standard has changed.

“The Supreme Court issued a ruling five years ago that said any discharge to groundwater that travels quickly to near-shore waters can be considered a discharge from the utility,” she said. “It’s like they’re piping it straight out into the water.”

The other thing that’s changed since 2016, she said, is “there are now stacks and stacks of scientific data showing that shallow wells are a bad idea in the Keys.”

A sugary solution

One of the last people I interviewed about all this was FOLKS’ attorney, Caron Balkany. Bar records show she’s been practicing law for nearly 50 years. After five decades, I think you can stop saying “practicing” and just say she’s perfected it.

Since the DEP has failed to do anything for the past 12 months, I asked, do you anticipate hauling KWRU into court the way you did the others?

“From what I understand, KWRU has to submit an application to renew its permit by August,” she said. “At that point, the DEP will consider what to do about it. We’ll see if they take into account any of the information we’ve sent them.”

But why, I asked, would the DEP wait even one day to take action?

The evidence seems clear the utility is treating a marine sanctuary like a toilet. Why not issue a pro-environment version of a cease-and-desist order? Why not tell KWRU to stop spewing its stinky stuff into Safe Harbor?

She sighed and said, “I used to ask myself that question, but I don’t anymore.”

If I ran DEP, I’d offer two options. One is what I’ve already mentioned: Tell KWRU to clean up its act, pronto.

The other option: DEP should tell the utility that the only way it can renew its permit for treating sewage is if — instead of continuing to taint Safe Harbor — it instead pipes it over into the drinking fountain for its corporate headquarters.

That way only KWRU functionaries will drink it, not manatees. It won’t be polluting the sanctuary anymore.

And with all that sucralose in it, think how sweet it will taste!