In Florida, Marion County is to water what the Middle-East is to oil. Ocala Magazine takes a close look at our most important and, quite possibly, most endangered resource.

We live and play in and around the water. We’re blessed by geology and geography with rivers, lakes, streams and ponds, but our real treasure is down below. Marion County is positioned over a gold mine — liquid gold. Underneath us lies a vast oasis of pure-grade, high-test water called the Florida Aquifer. The bad news is that we are guzzling that water at a record pace and our aquifer is beginning to reflect abuse. The good news is that if we act now, the damage can be reversed. Since it supports our entire way of life, the decisions we make now will have an almost immeasurable ripple effect on the future of this entire area.

With that in mind, on July 10th Ocala Magazine, with the help of Heather Dannenhower, the county public information manager, assembled a panel of key county officials to discuss the scope of the challenges before us.


This water roundtable included:

Tracy Straub | stormwater engineer
Flip Mellinger | assistant utilities director
Todd Petrie |  assistant utilities director of engineering
Nia Haynes | conservation coordinator
James Couillard | county parks designer
Barbra Hernandez | public education specialist, stormwater division

We are water rich in Marion County. And they’re coming to get some of it. Our neighbors want to purchase large amounts of our water and pipeline it to their communities. Bottled water companies tap into our flow. Until recently, there was a plan by the St. Johns district to begin tapping into our rivers.

We’ve so many water resources that it takes two water district bodies to govern Marion County, which is divided in half at I-75: The South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) to the west and the St. Johns River Water Management District (SJRWMD) to the east.

Marion County Commission Vice-Chairwoman Barbara Fitos says it’s time to end conflict and dissolve into partnerships.

“If you look back on the history of this conversation about water in the state of Florida, they refer to it as ‘Water Wars,’” Fitos said,“So we’re pitting one community against another.”

How do we convince Marion County residents that conserving water is the key to our future when we have so much of it at our disposal?

Haynes, one of the newest employees, recalled the famous Benjamin Franklin quote, “You know the worth of your well when it runs dry.” She and others at the Water Round Table feel an inflated sense of water abundance winds up hurting conservation.

“I think that’s very telling in our situation because there are springs and rivers all over north central Florida,” said Haynes. “We’re taking it for granted at the moment, it’s a great place to go swimming and stuff like that. When the springs run down, when the water levels in the rivers run down, then you know the worth of your water.”

They are all searching for new ways to attack the water problems, present and future. Clearly it will take more than just passing laws and lobbying state politicians. We all must share the water burden. There must be a willingness to go “green” with our natural resources.

“Make blue the new green,” suggests Hernandez.

We have a long way to go, because it is estimated Marion County residents are wasting as much as six and seven million gallons per day in irrigation, according to Jeff Halcomb, Ocala’s Director of Water and Sewer operations.

Some of the irrigation water evaporates and returns to the atmosphere because of our poor irrigation habits. Yes, we may have plenty of water, with no threat of it ever running out, but the whole upper Floridian Aquifer doesn’t belong to us.

Equally as difficult a job in swaying public sentiment is convincing others that while groundwater may be the cheapest and most efficient way to service our water needs today, that might change tomorrow. Halcomb, looking to the future, sees that the backup plan will likely have to become desalination.

Even though it could be a long way down the road — Halcomb’s projections look a century or more ahead — the public should know the de-sal water might be “10 times more costly” than the current city water output, which comes from the city-owned well field. And there is the problem of what to do about the aquifer when levels drop.

Scary projections of the zero hour have surfaced, the latest being 2030 when the water supply could become critical.

However, Halcomb says we need to be concerned before that and sees a shortfall happening before 2028, “and after that if we can’t conserve, we have a problem.”

Halcomb isn’t worried about us running out of water, though. “That will never, never happen,” he said. “However, if we keep tapping into the aquifer, the impact will be like hundreds of thousands of us sucking straws at the same time. The springs, rivers and streams around us will begin to dry out.”

Baby Boomers remember Marion County’s crystal clear waters flowing plentifully from Mother Earth. Silver Springs, especially, was at the top of the food chain. One only needed to take a glass bottom boat ride to become almost mesmerized by fish and wildlife.

Then one day the fish started disappearing. Then the wildlife.

Clay Albright, former member of the St. John’s Water Management District, remembers the day he went back to “The Springs” with his children a few years ago after an extended absence.

He had remembered as a boy seeing the sun piercing through the water in river grass. “Back then there were redbreast bream, like I used to catch on my granddaddy’s dock at Lake George,” said Albright. “There were blue channel catfish in there. Big bass. Alligator gars.”

Albright was staggered at all the algae and the shrunken fish population. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said.

While Marion County’s water issues are not tied directly to Silver Springs, it is a beacon of change.

The ecology of “The Springs” has been documented all the way back to the 1950s when a study was done by University of Florida faculty member Howard Odum.

Odum, the author of 15 books who came back to UF in 1970 and stayed there through the 1990s, found out that Silver Springs was one of the most productive ecosystems in the world. When he returned to Florida in the 1970s, he was joined by a young graduate student named Bob Knight, who did a restudy and wrote his doctoral dissertation on Silver Springs.

“He was interested in how ecosystems performed,” Knight said of Odum. “He selected Silver Springs as the perfect laboratory for that study. He spent four years collecting data on the springs’ ecology funded by the U.S. Navy.”

Using the same criteria Odum used, as owner of the company Wetland Solutions, Knight worked with Florida professors to conduct a 50-year retrospective study some 26 years later, in 2004.

In his restudy, Knight hypothesized (but never proved) that the fish population had been cut by more than 90 percent and concluded that the probable cause for that decline was the construction of the Rodman Dam in the late 1960s. He also documented nitrates increasing in the spring flow, a clear sign that the underlying aquifer is contaminated with this plant growth nutrient.

There is still hope that can be corrected.

The good news, he said, was that this might yet be reversible, because during the wet season the aquifer can flush itself. It needs, as do all our bodies of water, a little tender loving care.

Knight believes “The Springs” is ideal for this kind of research.

“It’s got a long history with written records back as far as the 1800s about the water clarity, plants, and fish.”

On a clear day, you could see forever into Silver Springs. Nobody knows that better than people like ex-model Betty Haskins, the former Miss Silver Springs, who was the subject of many underwater photos seen around the world. Haskins recalls it as a Disney-like experience.

Training as an underwater model and stunt person for several movies and TV shows gave Haskins the opportunity to swim in the springs year round with a constant 72 degrees Fahrenheit temperature. The shows that she worked on, like “Sea Hunt,” came to Silver Springs because they could film in some of the clearest water in the world.

“I came to feel that it would be possible to stay under the water indefinitely because the purity and transparency of the water made you feel that it was air,” said Haskins. “The clarity was amazing.”

If only our water future were that clear. Local officials are drilling down, so to speak, for answers.

About the only thing splinter groups agree on is the need to conserve. As conservation coordinator, some of that education process will fall to Haynes in her new role.

“I think educating people is the best way to get them to change their behavior,” said Haynes “You can’t force it on anybody. You can’t yell at them and tell them to turn off their sprinklers and stop watering their lawns, but tell them the reason why.”

Leaks are a big culprit, along with overwatering lawns. Simple checks of your home water systems and adapting to Florida Friendly landscaping can make a difference, says Mellinger.

“A program we have going on right now, we’re offering 150 different residents in the county to have the opportunity to have someone come out and actually evaluate their landscaping and irrigation system,” said Mellinger.

Petrie, the assistant director of county utilities, agreed that growing the wrong kind of grass on the wrong kind of landscaped lawns contributes to the problem. “St. Augustine lawns are nice, but they require a lot of water, and the outdoor water conservation is where a lot of the focus is going to be,” Petrie said.

The panel also talked about the diversity of the state and how Marion County’s needs are different — even within the county — and how agriculture plays such a big role.

Said Commissioner Fitos: “The issues we have in Marion County, with the amount of agricultural land that we have, and the amount of open space we have, is a whole lot different than the dense areas in Orange County. Each individual community must address where their needs are coming from.”

Straub points out there is a reason that Marion County — though governed by two different districts — is under the rules of the St. Johns group: Conditions are quite different in North Florida.

Said Straub: “It’s uniquely different than the southern half of the state that is struggling today. And it’s a lifestyle, and I hope that a lot of people chose to be here in Marion county and that we’re all neighbors and we all need to work towards preserving this lifestyle.”

Couillard agreed: “What makes Tracy proud to be a Marion County native is why my family and me moved here. Growing up in south Florida, I have the same history of background of water conservation, saltwater intrusion was the word we heard when we had water problems; when your wells ran dry or you were sucking saltwater in.”

Clean water, of course, is yet another challenge. And that takes more than just finding a sweet spot in the aquifer because the Environmental Protection Agency requires the City of Ocala water department to file an annual report. Thus the Consumer Confidence Report.

There are 110 potential contaminants in city water with moderate to high susceptibility levels. Contaminants include everything from viruses and bacteria, to salts and metals, to pesticides and herbicides, to organic chemicals — even radioactive contaminants.

So all water — including bottled — contains some of those contaminants.

According to the 2008 Water Quality Report, Ocala’s city water drinkers are getting the “highest quality drinking water possible.”

One person who sees the Silver River almost daily is Scott Mitchell, director of the Silver River Museum. He says the reason Silver Springs is such a visible microcosm is local familiarity.

“One of the reasons is that it’s easiest to see with your eyes — especially if you’ve grown up here,” said Mitchell. “You could take a canoe and go out on the Silver River and say ‘gee, there’s a heckuva lot more of that brown, fuzzy algae than I ever remember as a kid. There’s not as many fish, there’s not as many otters’ — all these things you can see with your eyes where the river has degraded slowly over time because of impact of people, basically.

“But that’s just the superficial problem.”

Mitchell says the bigger problem exists if the water is already coming out of the ground with extra nutrients, phosphates, nitrates and trace amounts of various kinds of pollutants. “And that means our water supply has become impacted.”

Knight points out the enormity of the Silver Springs water source. “It has the longest, long-term flow of any spring in the world that has been measured,” he said. “Florida has the biggest concentration of artesian wells in the world, over 700. And Silver is the biggest of them.”

Marion County sits right in the flow, said Knight, but it also has Rainbow Springs and numerous others in the forest nearby. To apply the real estate axiom to water, this county has location, location, location.

“By being in the center of the state, Marion County has a very, very thick portion of the Florida Aquifer underneath it, thousands of feet thick,” said Knight. “It has an enormous storage of water in that part of the aquifer.”

Fitos believes Marion County’s enlightened perspective will lead the way for others.

“We are setting ourselves in Marion County to be a prototype,” said Fitos. “‘This is the way you do it.’ And that’s got to have clout. Because if we prove that, we’re being accountable  and we’re setting that standard of best practices.”

Just maybe, if we get started now, things can improve. Knight sees evidence that could happen.

“Older water coming out of springs seems to have fewer nitrates,” he said, which means that most of the contamination is not concentrated deep in the aquifer.

At least we know now, that while we have a deep pit of water, it’s not a bottomless pit.