Environmental Matters in the Commonwealth of Kentucky

There is a huge environmental problem in south Florida that you probably never heard about at your local travel agent.  The next time you think about taking take the kids on a vacation to a sunny Florida beach to wade in the warm tropic waters, keep in mind that three densely populated counties in south Florida pump about 300 million gallons of partially treated urban waste water into the Atlantic Ocean each day.  That is a nice way of saying that the counties are dumping 300,000,000 gallons of partially treated human sewage into the ocean each day.  Wading in diluted shit ain’t my idea of a vacation, especially not for young children. 

The partially treated sewage is pumped into the ocean even though it is too polluted to be used to water lawns in sunny Florida.  Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties dump the pollution into the ocean every day.   Florida officials defend dumping the partially treated sewage into the ocean because ocean currents probably carries the pollution away from the source area.  What are they thinking down there in south Florida?  Sounds like the old axiom of “out of sight, out of mind” in play to me.  Apparently, a light is slowly coming on in the Florida legislature that this practice of treating the ocean like a giant toilet bowl should end — in about 16 years.   A MSNBC story on the situation is found at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24277051/.