By Brigette Smith
Executive Director of the Republican Party Marion County
DID YOU KNOW: Sewage effluent is being dumped into our Aquifer.
According to the CDC, Marion county is leading in cancer sicknesses and it is getting worse. Boiling water won’t help remove carcinogens, according to health officials. Best way to say it is, we have a sewage problem in central Florida, and it’s not coming from farmer’s agriculture, nor homes with septic systems.
Few people know that the University of Florida and Gainesville utilities inject vast quantities of sewage effluent every day and we are all living with this awful situation. According to their own data, the University of Florida and Gainesville Utilities are injecting 16 million gallons of sewage effluent every single day straight into the Florida aquifer – right under where people live and drink and especially suffer downstream. No one currently employed at the sewage treatment plants invented this method of dumping sewage effluent. It’s been going on and increasing for many decades. Some wastewater goes in the Alachua sinkhole into the drinking water aquifer, some goes into Kanapaha injection pipes to the drinking water aquifer, This must stop.
That’s not “recharge!” That’s chronic low-level exposure to sewage carcinogens daily for thousands of families in Ocala, Silver Springs, Lake Weir, Rainbow Springs, the Villages and Marion county now leads the nation in cancer rates for people under 50 according to the CDC and NIH.
The sewage effluent can be used in farming safely under the Sun, or in a data center safely. The XAI Colossus data center uses 13,000,000 gallons daily of sewage effluent to cool data chips, just outside Memphis, Tennessee. The numbers are ugly, especially for women with breast cancer. Blaming septic tanks is nonsense. A septic system works in the gold zone, the top 12 feet, exactly where sun, oxygen, and biology turn waste into fertilizer. There is no pipe from any septic tank going 400 feet down into the aquifer. The gold zone solution is simple: keep the effluent up top where nature designed the nitrogen cycle to work. Uses for example on Surface irrigation, golf courses, or even cooling data centers like XAI Colossus data center. Same water, zero aquifer risk, and free fertilizer.
No number of words like treatment, recharge, recycle sewage emissions can change what is really happening. It is polluting our drinking water source
UF has the science. Florida Representatives and Senators along with Governor DeSantis are keen on health and prosperity for all. Shut down the deep middle and shallow pipe injection, move all sewage liquids to work and profit on the surface in the gold zone. We protect our families, children and our community, real estate values and turn a liability into an asset.
