A Ribbon of Wastewater: "This is one really big experiment" Dying Gulf of Mexico

Right now, anywhere we go from shore to 20 miles offshore, from Sarasota to Tarpon Springs, we can’t find a single creature alive on the bottom right now,” said Miller.

Miller says he’s never seen such death and devastation under water in his 20 years of diving.

“All the coral, all the sponges, all the crabs, not a single living thing, all the star fish, the brittle stars, everything’s dead,” said Miller

“This is really one big experiment”  … and Keys’ waters are the guinea pig.  Remember that everything that goes into the Gulf of Mexico… including what comes from the Mississippi River… unless it settles to the bottom, flows through the Strait of Florida… past the Keys.  Dilution is not the solution to pollution.  This 8/02 Miami Herald article describes the “experiment”.

“For two weeks, a barge has been dumping millions of gallons of wastewater from a bankrupt fertilizer plant into the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.

Now, looping currents have drawn water from the dump zone, along with a huge plume of runoff from the Mississippi River, toward the Keys and into the Florida Straits. Satellite tracking showed traces of the stream off Marathon on Friday and it likely will continue to flow up along the East Coast.

Scientists monitoring the state’s ocean dumping plan don’t expect significant effects, but the nutrient-laced stream brings with it considerable uncertainty and the unsettling specter of fish-killing red tides and the ”black water” algae bloom that devastated sensitive corals, sponges and seagrasses in the Keys last year.

”We don’t really know what the impact will be,” said Mitchell Roffer, a Miami-based biological oceanographer hired to monitor the dumping for the fishing industry. “This is really one big experiment.”

There is little to worry about, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection insists.

The agency concocted the controversial and expensive ( about $120 million) scheme to dispose of about 500 million gallons of highly acidic water brimming in pits perilously close to fragile Tampa Bay.