Thread: Pet Rock

Sometimes I think the gewberment is about as smart as a pet rock. Who knows, you might have heard that before! Now admittedly they do some good work too. I think my mailman is great. Drops off and and picks up my packages at my front door. And I've been selling a lot of SLABSAUCE lately so I usually have lots of packages going out. Gotta love it.

Anyway, Crappiegirl invited me to attend a tour of the NuRF (Nutrient Reduction Facility) located at the North end of lake Apopka down here in Florida. You see, she lives downstream from this facility and has been complaining about muck collecting and filling up her canal for years. The gewberment is actually doing a good thing by trying to reduce the phosphates coming out of the Lake Apopka area waters which used to be home to many muck farms (they used/abused tons of fertilizers back in the old days).

So having visited the facility it's really obvious to me what the problem is. I'm certainly no expert, and you be the judge of what I'm about to share, but it just seems way too obvious to me.

They are using Aluminum Sulfate to clear up the water coming out of Lake Apopka. That's what the NuRF is all about. They dump about a million dollars of Aluminum Sulfate into the water a year. It turns suspended particles in the water into sludge. They have two ponds they direct the water through to allow the sludge to settle, and they have a dredge running most of the time to remove the sludge from those ponds. It's really as simple as that.

I asked a simple question during this tour. Does any Aluminum Sulfate make its way down the canal and their answer was yes. Which is fine, because as I understand it, Aluminum Sulfate is not harmful. It's used everywhere to clean water.

OK, so stay with me here. Clear water comes out of the NuRF, and into the canal. Fantastic! Nothing wrong with that. No sludge there. We seen it. You could see clear down to the bottom of the water coming out the end of the NuRF.

But the thing is, there's still some Aluminum Sulfate in that clear water. They admitted it in the tour. There's no process to completely remove it, and they're annually dumping a million dollars worth of Aluminum Sulfate into the water. So for fact the stuff is making it's way in the “clear water” on down the canal to the next spot where there's “not clear water”. And it's there where piles of sludge is being created.

It also turns out there's some big farm still allowed to send run off into the canal between the NuRF and Crappiegirl's canal. So bingo. What happens when Aluminum Sulfate meets farm run off, you get sludge. But there's no dredge there to remove the sludge. So now when a storm comes though like there are so many of here in Florida, or a Hurricane, the added flow moves all that sludge downstream right in front of Crappiegirl's canal! I'm telling you, I think the guberment is about as smart as a pet rock sometimes!

What they need to do is run another dredge downstream somewhere so that the residual Aluminum Sulfate in that “temporarily” clear water they are releasing is captured and not allowed downstream to clog up the canal system. After all, I think whoever dumps chemicals into the water upstream is supposed to be responsible for the effects those chemicals have downstream. Seems simple, right?


These are the Aluminum Sulfate Storage Tanks at the Apopka NuRF (Nutrient Reduction Facility).


The pumping station. They utilize many different techniques at Lake Apopka to help clean up the water. They use large swamp areas which are actually lower than the lake level, and flow water through them to act as filters. Then they pump the water back into the lake.