Water pumps spark debate: Pollution puts water managers in conflict with environmentalists

This is the machinery that keeps Weston, Cooper City and Davie from flooding.

Atop an earthen divide between paved and liquefied west Broward County -- where drained suburbia meets original Everglades swampland -- are three powerful pumps, tucked in a beige blockhouse of storm-proof concrete.

The diesel pumps near U.S. 27 and Griffin Road have a simple mission: to pull floodwaters gathered by the C-11 canal east to west, away from Broward County suburbs and into protected state wetlands at Everglades Holiday Park.

The 1,800-horsepower pumps don't move just water -- a combined 1.3 million gallons a minute at full-bore -- though: They thrust phosphorus, pesticides and other pollution into the protected marshes. That has propelled the pump house west of Southwest Ranches into a five-year court battle that will culminate in a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court Jan. 14.

Interest in the outcome of the case stretches well beyond the flats of South Florida to mountainous Colorado, beyond the waterlogged landscape of the 'Glades into the parched terrain of Arizona, through the Midwest and into New England.

"This is huge," said Virginia Albrecht, a Clean Water Act expert and attorney in Washington, D.C. "Water moving is sort of integral to civilized life."

The pump-operating South Florida Water Management District will ask justices to reverse an appellate court ruling ordering water managers to obtain federal Clean Water Act permits, which would require the district to find a way to clean the water it moves through the S-9 pump station.

Taking sides

Federal permitting "would wreak havoc, mandating costly, time-consuming and burdensome bureaucratic proceedings," the district's legal brief states. It would be non-productive, disrupting the $8 billion federal-state effort to restore the Everglades by diverting district resources, water managers say.

District officials argue they don't need the permits because they don't add the pollutants to the water but merely pass it from Point A to Point B. The contaminants come from yards, agricultural and commercial lands and other sources.

The Miccosukees and Friends of the Everglades, which sued the district, counter that the pumps tug water east to west against the natural water flow, which makes them a pollution generator.

Twenty-four states -- along with other water-moving authorities, local and county governments and environmental regulators -- have jumped on one side or the other of this legal fight over the S-9 pump station and what they see as a defining moment for the scope of the Clean Water Act.

District officials backed by the U.S. Solicitor General, plus Arizona, Utah, Colorado, South Dakota, New Mexico and other western states, say the Environmental Protection Agency permits are meant for monitoring industrial discharges such as factory pipes spewing effluent. Congress, they say, didn't intend them for flood controllers and water suppliers transferring water for the "public good." They contend the appellate court misinterpreted the Clean Water Act.

"This is going to kill us. This is going to hurt us throughout the district," said Nicolas Gutierrez, district board chairman.

Albrecht said obtaining the permits "is not like getting a driver's license. These are significant permits that take a long time to negotiate and have very rigorous conditions attached to them."

Earthjustice attorney David Guest said the district is employing "the Chicken Little argument."

"No, it won't screw them up at all," said Guest, who represents the National Wildlife Federation, the Sierra Club, the Environmental Resources Defense Council and several other environmental clients in the case.

District officials say they already are following a state master plan to clean and restore the Everglades that will essentially divert dirty C-11 water away from the famous wetlands. In one step, they built smaller pumps next to the S-9 to begin to separate cleaner water at the canal's west end that the marshes can safely absorb.

Tribal criticism

Tribe attorney Dexter Lehtinen, backed by Friends of the Everglades and a litany of other environmental groups, is sharply critical of the monumental resistance he says the district is putting up for "one piddling little pump" in a 16-county flood control network. He argues the district is out to escape federal clean water obligations and said water managers have scared the western states through exaggeration.

Under the district's view, he said, pre-existing pollution in Maine could be pumped without penalty cross-country, "against flow, up mountains and down, to pollute water in Southern California."

The tribe and its allies don't trust the state to correctly carry out a cleanup regimen spelled out in a 1992 federal court directive, and see the federal permits as helping to ensure that gets done.

District attorney James Nutt said of that allegation, "It's so far from the truth." He said the tribe concerns are "parochial," fixated on pumps that spew fairly low-level pollution compared to other sources.

"The Miccosukees are saying "Take care of us first,'" said district General Counsel Sheryl Wood.

Vital to drainage

The pumps at issue, large enough to power a cruise ship, are so vital to southwest Broward that without them communities draining into the C-11 would be swamped "within days" even when it's dry from water seeping out from under the Everglades. The devices are supposed to kick on when water levels in the C-11 Canal climb to 4 feet above sea level, and switch off when that falls to 1 foot.

To district supervisor John Vila, the machines represent "strength, security and comfort" -- flood control. But beyond their water-churning flows, Everglades Holiday Park airboat tour owner Clint Bridges said he can see the impact of the phosphorus-laden outfall: cattails have overtaken the sawgrass expanses that once dominated that water.

"I'm glad somebody did something about it" Bridges says of the court challenge.

Pennsylvania and other states fear that if the district prevails it will undercut their own water-quality protection programs, which rely on the same type of federal permits. Rick Mather, with Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection, said his agency found the permits were a fine and very manageable enforcement tool.

But if the district loses, western states fear they'll be forced to seek permits at every point at which they transfer water from one body to a different one. The Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District north of Denver, for example, worries it might be kept from passing a portion of Colorado River headwaters through a 13.1-mile tunnel to a Mississippi River tributary, and pristine streams along the way.

"We would have to stop moving water," said conservancy attorney Robert Trout. "We simply can't as a practical matter treat it. It's too much."

Neil Santaniello can be reached at nsantaniello@sun-sentinel.com or 561-243-6625.
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