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Keeping The Bay Healthy

STAFF photo by Robert Burke/The Tampa Tribune

Richard Boler, Hillsborough County EPC, checks a salinity station in Tampa Bay. He took a group of civic leaders to see monitoring equipment recently installed to keep tabs on water quality near the desalination plant next to TECO Big Bend power plant in Apollo Beach.

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By SUSAN M. GREEN

The Tampa Tribune

Published: April 2, 2008

APOLLO BEACH - The question had to do with how many mackerel caught in Tampa Bay could be safely consumed in a week.

It made environmental scientist Richard Boler chuckle. It's not a question he would have fielded 30 years ago, when he began conducting checkups of the bay's health for Hillsborough County's Environmental Protection Commission.

"When I started my career, there were no mackerel in the bay," he said.

That says a lot about how far Bay area residents have come in cleaning up the big pool in their backyard, Boler told some Apollo Beach residents on a boat tour last week to learn about environmental monitoring near the Tampa Bay Water desalination plant.

Sewage and untreated agricultural runoff were considered the top pollution culprits in the 1970s, Boler said.

Today's threats are different, he said, and some are related to the harvesting of drinking water for a growing Bay area population.

That's why officials with the county's EPC and Water Resource Team shuffled resources to salvage key elements of a monitoring program intended to keep tabs on the environmental effects of new water sources, including the desalination plant.

Budget cuts eliminated the program, which cost about $415,000 last year, Boler said. But he and Mario Cabana, program manager for the Water Resource Team, estimated they have been able to pay for $75,000 worth of sampling and analysis by juggling staff time and other resources.

"We're just trying to maintain a rudimentary program," Cabana said.

About $36,000 will go toward monitoring in the Apollo Beach area around the desalination plant, which cranked into full production in December. The balance is aimed at checkups in local rivers tapped for water supply.

The plant is permitted to produce 25 million gallons of drinking water a day and discharge 19 million gallons of concentrated saltwater into Hillsborough Bay. EPC's monitoring stations and monthly visits with hand-held equipment will check salinity and dissolved oxygen levels and temperature.

So far, the plant appears to be in compliance with its discharge permit, said Fred Nassar, an assistant director in EPC's water division.

Tampa Bay Water, which owns the desalination facility, must conduct water sampling and report results to state and local officials.

The EPC program, originally approved in 1999 when new water sources were on the drawing table, provides an additional safeguard, Boler said.

"Independent monitoring was established because people like you Apollo Beach residents ... said, 'We don't trust these guys. We want someone in our own corner to take a look at it,'" Boler said.

"We didn't want the fox guarding the hen house," said Dominick Gebbia, a member of the Apollo Beach Civic Association and former president of the defunct Save Our Bays, Air and Canals. The watchdog organization disbanded a few years after losing its legal challenge to the desalination plant, but former members said the effort resulted in environmental protection measures that wouldn't have been in place otherwise.

Gebbia and two other former members of the organization, Jeanette Doyle and Steve Jones, tagged along as Boler demonstrated how scientists collect data with hand-held instruments and rely on 'round-the-clock monitoring stations to provide information on the bay's health.

A total of 17 monitoring sites have been set up in the bay and some residential canals for monthly checks. Another three continuous monitoring stations fixed to poles feed information by telemetry to EPC's water lab in Tampa.

Equipment in the bay is costly because someone has to clean off barnacles and debris once or twice a week, depending on the season, Boler said. Probes are floated at various water depths, and tiny crabs or other organisms can interfere with readings, he said.

Apollo Beach data will be added to information collected from 52 other stations in Tampa Bay, Boler said. EPC maintains an additional 40 freshwater stations in the county. Water quality data goes back to 1974, Boler said.

The EPC collected data in the years before the desalination plant started production in 2003, Boler said. The plant sputtered along with operation problems until it was shuttered in 2005 for an overhaul.

The EPC suspended the extra Apollo Beach monitoring sometime after that, he said, but can use the information collected to determine whether the plant is causing salinity or temperature problems now that it is in full swing.

Results of the revived program could help determine whether changes should be made to the facility or whether it should be expanded to its full capacity of producing 35 million gallons per day, Boler said. The Tampa Bay Water board is expected to consider an expansion late this year.

Whether the EPC will be able to continue the Apollo Beach program is "iffy right now," Boler said, noting county budget officials are considering additional cuts in the wake of a state referendum that will reduce property taxes.

"We are in difficult times, and it's hard to carry on with these activities," he said.

EPC scientists will collect samples of organisms in the bay bed around Apollo Beach but will have to preserve them for analysis, Boler said. Sorting and identifying the microscopic creatures is the most costly part of benthic sampling, and the EPC doesn't have the funding, he said.

Gebbia said he remains disappointed that the desalination plant was built on a delicate estuary, but he was pleased to see safeguards remain intact.

"I feel it's a program that should be continued, and the county should support it," he said. "It's a shame that the county doesn't realize that the environment is a money-earning part of the economy."

Reporter Susan M. Green can be reached at (813) 865-1566 or sgreen@tampatrib.com.

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