A plan to pump partially treated water deep underground for a key Everglades restoration test has been scuttled. The South Florida Water Management District has backed away from that idea out of fear that it could jeopardize public support for a larger plan to bank voluminous amounts of surface water underground.
The district had wanted to send only partially treated water - which could still contain harmful microbes and pathogens - into 10 storage wells, one in West Palm Beach and nine on the drawing board. But when state legislators tried to make that practice legal in Florida last spring, environmentalists protested that it could contaminate underground sources of drinking water. That controversy killed the proposed bill and conjured up public perception that the state wanted to poison Florida's drinking water aquifers.