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COASTAL COMMUNITY COLIFORM AND NUTRIENT CONTROL STUDY
Impact/Purpose:
It is anticipated that the project will support local sewer installations or implementation of decentralized sewage treatment management. These installations will enhance sewage pretreatment before discharge into the environment when compared to current practices. They will also move the sewage discharge point from the coastal area to an inland site. These changes are expected to improve coastal water quality. Improvements in water quality are expected to reduce the risk of hypoxia, harmful algal blooms and reduce human exposure to waterborne pathogens in Florida coastal waters.
Description:
Recent water sampling conducted by the Suwannee River Water Management District has shown that coliform counts in waters adjacent to several coastal communities exceed the water quality standards for surface waters with respect to fecal and total coliform counts. Also, sampling conduced by the Taylor County, Florida, Health Department has shown unacceptably high levels of enterococci at beach3es. This is significant since these coastal community waters are commonly used for water recreation and recreational fishing (including scallops). These activities , in conjunction with th34 co0liform counts found, indicate that there is an unacceptable risk of human exposure to waterborne and food borne diseases. It is suspected that onsite sewage treatment and disposal systems and un-permitted systems (OSTDS) installed prior to 1983 may be one source of these fecal indicator bacteria in these waters. Many of the systems in these communities were installed well before modern regulatory requirements were in place. Older OSTDS did not require a 23-inch separation from the wet season water table and may be installed into or just above the water table. Current regulatory requirements prohibit this practice since it has been shown that systems installed in this manner result in poor removal of pathogenic organisms and nutrients. The purpose of this project is to conduct environmental tracing and monitoring to determine if the older OSTDS are a significant source of the coliform contamination in adjacent coastal waters and canals. Also certain nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorous will be monitored. Excessive nutrients in Gulf coastal environments have been shown to cause hypoxia. Comparisons of water quality near developed coastlines and undeveloped coastlines will show the impact of coastal development. Combining this information with dye tracer studies will quantify the impact of OSTDS. This will enable state and local officials to develop plans to establish a baseline to which other small coastal communities can be compared.