This is just another terrible environmental problem that people treat as "out of sight, out of mind".
I have also talked with surfers that say that the Miami sewers overflow during hurricanes. From what I have heard Miami has one of the oldest, most out of date sewer systems in the U.S..
With mayors like Manny Diaz and his administration wasting hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars in corruption and graft, you can see how these agency's don't have enough funds to enforce laws or let corporate enitities get away with environmental murder.
Put this on a nationwide level of this whole adminstration's desire to exploit the environment while big company's reap the benefits and make payoffs and its obvious to see how nothing changes.
The important thing to do is get involved instead of talking about what a bad problem this is and who is going to solve it.
There are several environmental protection agencies in FL and nationwide that work behind the scenes in litigation trying to get lawmakers to become more aware of these problems. The surfrider foundation, the nature conservancy, sierra club, Audubon of Florida, etc all work to preserve FL's natural areas.
I have a lot of faith in people's ability to change and do good, but I think most people won't make a change until it is too late. Clean water is just as big an issue as global warming and gets about as much response from the public.
Raw sewage doesn't just contain excess nutrients that pollute the water, it also contains mercury and phosphates that are very harmful to the fish and everything else that lives in and uses the water. Go snorkeling off of Crandon Park on Key Biscayne and you can see what happens when there are too many nutrients which equals an overgrowth of algae which chokes out the natural reef life that occurs there.
Look at what has happened with Lake Okeechobee and the excess nutrients and phophates that have deposited there over the years.
There is so much algae, algae that has died off and killed fish and this has happened time and time again, to the point that the lake is pretty much dead. It has crashed.
Just because the sewage is taken out to sea by the gulf stream does not mean that the pollutants "go away". The earth is very remarkable in its ability to recover from all the ways we mistreat it.
But it is essentially a "closed system", these pollutants aren't being put out in space, they are staying here in our air and our water.
Just like lake Okeechobee, it is huge and can filter and process much of what we put into it without being effected. But if we continue to produce wastes like mercury, phosphates, etc, etc, for an extended period of time without making any effort to reduce the damage we're creating, then it too will crash.
Too many people think that this is not their problem and someone else should handle it, but this is our collective problem because it will end up effecting all of us. To think that politicians and government will take care of problems like this is naive. Change will only come about if we let the people in power know that we won't tolerate our water, reefs, beaches, etc being mistreated and polluted.
Has anyone found out what the mercury content is on those fish feeding around the sewage? I know I wouldn't eat them.
Morgan
