Arsenic and Old Water
Four aquifer storage and recovery projects in the Tampa Bay area of Florida are challenging hydrological understanding by trying to reclaim water that has been pumped deep underground, where it collects arsenic and other impurities.
The local agencies undertaking aquifer storage and recovery (ASR) projects have planned them independently, hired their own consultants, and requested permits from their region’s water-management district. Each project’s continuation hinges on its wells’ performance, the presence of arsenic and other metals in the water, and saltwater intrusion.
These ASR projects extend into the Suwannee Limestone, a geological formation that underlies all five counties and extends beneath most of Florida. Its depth and thickness vary with location, as does its association with various metals—in solution or imbedded in the rock. In some places, salt water is present in the formation; elsewhere, it is not.
One issue is where to locate such wells. “Perhaps the safest place is within a mile of the coast where the natural underground water has a total dissolved solids value of 1,000 milligrams per liter or higher and the natural movement of the underground water is toward Tampa Bay,” says Charles Hammett, manager of Hillsborough County Water Resource Services’ engineering and environmental services group.
The effort to use the Suwannee Limestone as an ASR reservoir for reclaimed water came about because Florida’s five water-management districts are setting firm regulations limiting how much potable water municipalities and counties can draw from surface water sources and from shallower aquifers with potable water, including the Upper Floridan aquifer. Using reclaimed water where potability isn’t necessary helps to reduce the demand for potable water, and also decreases nutrient loading of rivers and the ocean from excess water runoff.
The southwest Florida counties with ASR projects are Hillsborough, Pinellas, Manatee, Sarasota, and Charlotte—all within the South West Florida Water Management District (SWFWMD). They dug deep ASR wells and adjoining monitoring wells into the Suwannee Limestone during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
“Monitoring wells are anywhere from 75 feet to several hundred feet from the injection well,” says Richard Deuerling, who works in the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s underground injection control division of water resource management. “The distance between monitoring and injection wells depends on the property site. We see the arsenic drop off after a period of time. From our monitoring, arsenic appears not to migrate long distances.”
Driving the impetus to make deep-well ASR work in Florida and elsewhere are the growing water requirements of an expanding population, as well as increasing demand from agribusiness, commercial, and industrial consumers.
The ASR wells in the Suwannee Limestone formation are designed to collect and store excess water that falls during Florida’s rainy season, from the end of May to mid-October, and to pump out and reclaim that excess water during the dry season for agriculture, golf-course irrigation, and other commercial and residential uses of nonpotable water. This has to be done without disrupting current underground water conditions and must meet all health requirements.
“As of February 1, 2007, we know of about 74 potable and reclaimed ASR facilities in development, construction, testing, or operation around the State of Florida,” Deuerling says.
ASR wells are tested using injection and removal cycles of varying length. For the initial short-term cycles, which are measured in days, reclaimed water is injected into a well for a few days, stored for a few days, and then recovered for a few days. Midterm cycles are measured in weeks, long-term cycles in months. The cycles grow progressively longer—unless problems are found.
 |
Photo: Manatee County |
| Injection-well piping |
ASR wells fail for a variety of reasons, including geochemical changes that increase the arsenic level or salinity of the water. Arsenic and other minerals occur naturally in dolomite and limestone. Resolving these problems—if they can be resolved—will entail considerable expense and the application of technology that either doesn’t yet exist or hasn’t been proved to work on such a large scale.
“Certain chemical environments allow arsenic to be released in Florida aquifers,” says Jonathan Arthur, an assistant state geologist with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. “Typically there is very little oxygen in the aquifer. When oxygen in the injected water is added to existing ground water and rock formations, arsenic may be released from rocks containing pyrite.”
Arsenic is anathema to regulatory agencies. In 2001 the EPA began imposing a new, more stringent arsenic contamination limit of 10 parts per billion for drinking water. (The old limit was 50 parts per billion.) Moreover, water containing excessive arsenic can’t be used for agriculture because arsenic builds up in the soil, in crops grown in arsenic-laden soil, and in people who eat such crops.
Large doses of arsenic can lead to shock and death. Chronic exposure to small doses can cause headache, confusion, nerve damage in the extremities, dark and scaly skin, thickening of the skin on the palms and soles, and white lines across the fingernails.
St. Petersburg’s ASR Well
“St. Petersburg is a peninsula attached to a second peninsula,” says Ralph Craig, a hydrogeologist for the City of St. Petersburg. “We have limited fresh groundwater and are surrounded by salt water. St. Petersburg has no publicly owned fresh-water wellfields. Some local residents have shallow wells 20 or 30 feet deep that pump fresh water from the local surficial aquifer for irrigation.
“We import our drinking water from Tampa Bay Water through an interlocal government agreement that provides wholesale water to the 2.4 million people in three counties—Hillsborough, Pinellas, and Pasco County (which includes New Port Richey). Fresh water is delivered to St. Petersburg through very long pipes. That’s why we’re experimenting with injecting fresh water into the deep wells and hope to have the water storage advantages when we need them.”
Alfredo Crafa, environmental compliance manager for St. Petersburg’s Water Resource Department, describes using ASR for potable water as “the leading edge of technology with reclaimed water. We hope to reduce the potable water demand by increasing the demand for reclaimed water.”
St. Petersburg built its ASR system at its Southwest Water Reclamation Facility near the Eckerd College campus on 54th Avenue South, a site in use since the 1950s. The ASR system to date has cost $1.2 million to plan, construct, and test. It utilized several existing monitor wells. The city received some up-front construction funding from the SWFWMD. Weekly testing of the ASR well and monitor wells costs over $100,000 a year.
St. Petersburg started to distribute reclaimed water in the mid-1970s. Today the city operates four reclaimed water facilities that produce about 36 million gallons per day. This system has over 10,400 active customers and 290 miles of reclaimed water-main lines of various sizes connecting the reclamation facilities to the system’s customers. These lines are separate from the community’s sanitary-sewer lines and potable-water lines.
St. Petersburg’s wells are drilled down through the surface sand and shell formations and the Upper Floridan aquifer into the deeper Suwannee Dolomite and Limestone formations.
“Sanitary sewer water is treated in St. Petersburg’s reclaimed water facilities and turned into reclaimed water,” says Crafa. On average, about 20 million gallons of reclaimed water per day are used in landscape and agricultural spray and irrigation systems. The large distribution loop system has thousands of residential connections, a few commercial clients, multifamily projects, cemeteries, golf courses, parks, and university campuses.
All of St. Petersburg’s reclamation facilities have short-term storage tanks. Craig says the ASR wells are intended to provide additional seasonal storage. “We started construction on our ASR system in 2001,” he says. “It takes several years to obtain an injection-well permit and to construct an ASR. Water cycle testing started in 2005. We’ve been through four complete cycles.”
 |
Photo: Manatee County |
| Monitor-well piping |
St. Petersburg does not discharge reclaimed water into its drinking-water aquifers so as not to contaminate them with arsenic and other dissolved solids that occur naturally in the deeper ASR wells. “The EPA definition of underground source of drinking water is less than 10,000 milligrams per liter of total dissolved solids,” Craig says. “The water into which we discharge has tens of thousands of milligrams of total dissolved solids per liter, and it is not regulated as an underground source of drinking water. We monitor our well system extensively to make sure we don’t violate any EPA or health standards.
“As wells go deeper, the naturally occurring water gets saltier. We’re injecting our water below underground sources of drinking water, so we don’t have regulation issues.”
Crafa says the water being injected into the ASR well either stays in place or moves laterally in the Suwannee Limestone formation.
“Injection and recovery build up a fresh-water bubble as we cycle water in and out,” says Craig. “In summer during the rainy season, we fill up voids in the rocks and temporarily displace the salt water that is down there. Fresh water pushes the salt water away from the well. In the dry season, we recover water from the well when it is needed until it becomes salty. We’re trying to build a buffer zone between the naturally occurring salt water and our injected water.”
On a typical injection day, the ASR receives about 1.5 million gallons. During the withdrawal phase of a cycle, a similar amount is removed each day until the amount needed has been recovered. (See Table 1.)
Hillsborough County’s ASR Wells
Hillsborough County’s Water Resource Services built two ASR projects, which together cost $3 million. From 1998 to 2004, one project used water from the Northwest Regional Water Reclamation Facility and the River Oaks Wastewater Treatment Plant. The second, built to support the South County Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant at Port Redwing, about 1,300 feet from Tampa Bay, was shut down before cycle testing could begin.
Rising costs and the new EPA/FDEP arsenic standards contributed to the shutdown. “They were costing more than I wanted to spend on projects I could not guarantee at this stage would work for us,” Hammett says.
Hillsborough County has about 315 miles of reclaimed water lines serving about 15,000 customers—14,700 residential customers and 300 commercial and industrial customers, including Tampa Electric Company’s Big Bend Power Plant.
“In the 1980s,” Hammett says, “it was hard to find users of our reclaimed water. Today about 60% of it is used. Some of our original residential customers pay a flat monthly rate, but we meter all our new clients. We can only accommodate locations close to our reclaimed-water mains. Laying new pipe is expensive.
“All ASR wells go through a lengthy planning, research- and cycle-testing periods that may take years. We were one of the first locations in Florida to try reclaimed ASRs. Our problem is to store water in our wet season to satisfy our clients’ needs in the dry season. We are looking for ways to do this. ASR appeared to offer one solution. Another solution is reclaimed-water reservoirs, but ASR underground sources are preferable because we don’t have to worry about screening or treating for algae, fish, and frogs.
Hillsborough County’s first ASR well was about 450 feet deep. During cycle testing, it yielded water with total dissolved solids and salinity levels high enough to kill grass. That well has been plugged and abandoned. “None of our pretests prepared us for the high salinity levels,” says Hammett. “There must be fractures in the well’s geological formations. Every time you drill for water you test ahead of time, but it is still your best shot.”
South of Tampa Bay
Manatee County, which adjoins Hillsborough and Pinellas counties at the south end of Tampa Bay, encompasses 741 square miles. It has a population of about 307,000, including 54,000 in Bradenton, the county seat and largest city. The county’s drinking water comes from Lake Manatee, a reservoir behind a dam on the Manatee River.
Manatee County’s three sewage-treatment plants receive 23.1 million gallons a day of wastewater—nearly half of St. Petersburg’s volume—and converts it to reclaimed water. Manatee’s Southwest Treatment Plant (built in 1972, upgraded in 1988) is on Bradenton’s southwest side, in a growing residential area close to the publicly owned 18-hole Manatee County Golf Course, the private nine-hole Timber Creek Golf Course, and a 1,600-acre gladiola farm.
Initially, Manatee County limited its distribution of reclaimed water to the adjoining golf course and the gladiola farm. Eventually each treatment plant had its own local distribution system, serving mainly golf courses and agricultural interests. Distribution throughout the county began in late 2006 through a dedicated 28-mile system of main pipes that links the three sewage treatment plants. Smaller mains connect the reclaimed-water system to 960 master-meter clients, including Schroeder-Manatee Ranch Inc. and McClure Farms; several other golf courses; residential communities; and parks.
“We started to develop our ASR in 2001,” says David Shulmister, Manatee County’s wastewater division manager. “We drilled our ASR feasibility project, a Class-V well and a monitor well. We did our first cycle test in December of 2004—11 days of injection, two days of storage, and 12 days of recovery. Our second cycle began in March of 2005—35 days of injection, six days of storage, and 21 days of recovery.
“Arsenic was found in the monitor wells. Arsenic is limited to ten parts per billion, and we were finding 50 to 100 parts per million in our monitor wells.”
The project was placed on indefinite hold because of a conflict between the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and the EPA over whether to allow the potential contamination of underground sources of drinking water. “Some development of arsenic is even seen in a potable well’s monitor wells,” Shulmister says. “The EPA says they can’t have migration of contaminates. The DEP will give us an operating permit if the arsenic goes away, but if it doesn’t, we have to shut down. Our consultant, CH2M Hill, does not recommend that we spend additional money to build additional monitor wells because of what we’re likely to find during cycle testing. The DEP requires us to continue testing our wells once a month, and the arsenic rate in the samples remains the same.”
Shulmister says no one except the Florida Department of Environmental Protection is challenging the EPA rule, and changing it may take years. Meanwhile, Manatee County is exploring other ways to store water for agricultural and residential use, including construction of a new 75-acre lake near the North Wastewater Treatment Plant.
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The next two counties south of Manatee—Sarasota and Charlotte—share an ASR system developed at the Englewood Water District’s water reclamation facility, which serves 44.5 square miles of southern Sarasota County and western Charlotte County. It has three wellfields with fresh water and two with brackish water.
The Englewood ASR has a 700-foot well with a 500-foot casing. The storage zone is the uncased 200 feet at the bottom of the well, which is in cycle testing.
January-February 2008
Arsenic and Old Water
Four aquifer storage and recovery projects in the Tampa Bay area of Florida are challenging hydrological understanding by trying to reclaim water that has been pumped deep underground, where it collects arsenic and other impurities.
The local agencies undertaking aquifer storage and recovery (ASR) projects have planned them independently, hired their own consultants, and requested permits from their region’s water-management district. Each project’s continuation hinges on its wells’ performance, the presence of arsenic and other metals in the water, and saltwater intrusion.
These ASR projects extend into the Suwannee Limestone, a geological formation that underlies all five counties and extends beneath most of Florida. Its depth and thickness vary with location, as does its association with various metals—in solution or imbedded in the rock. In some places, salt water is present in the formation; elsewhere, it is not.
One issue is where to locate such wells. “Perhaps the safest place is within a mile of the coast where the natural underground water has a total dissolved solids value of 1,000 milligrams per liter or higher and the natural movement of the underground water is toward Tampa Bay,” says Charles Hammett, manager of Hillsborough County Water Resource Services’ engineering and environmental services group.
The effort to use the Suwannee Limestone as an ASR reservoir for reclaimed water came about because Florida’s five water-management districts are setting firm regulations limiting how much potable water municipalities and counties can draw from surface water sources and from shallower aquifers with potable water, including the Upper Floridan aquifer. Using reclaimed water where potability isn’t necessary helps to reduce the demand for potable water, and also decreases nutrient loading of rivers and the ocean from excess water runoff.
The southwest Florida counties with ASR projects are Hillsborough, Pinellas, Manatee, Sarasota, and Charlotte—all within the South West Florida Water Management District (SWFWMD). They dug deep ASR wells and adjoining monitoring wells into the Suwannee Limestone during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
“Monitoring wells are anywhere from 75 feet to several hundred feet from the injection well,” says Richard Deuerling, who works in the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s underground injection control division of water resource management. “The distance between monitoring and injection wells depends on the property site. We see the arsenic drop off after a period of time. From our monitoring, arsenic appears not to migrate long distances.”
Driving the impetus to make deep-well ASR work in Florida and elsewhere are the growing water requirements of an expanding population, as well as increasing demand from agribusiness, commercial, and industrial consumers.
The ASR wells in the Suwannee Limestone formation are designed to collect and store excess water that falls during Florida’s rainy season, from the end of May to mid-October, and to pump out and reclaim that excess water during the dry season for agriculture, golf-course irrigation, and other commercial and residential uses of nonpotable water. This has to be done without disrupting current underground water conditions and must meet all health requirements.
“As of February 1, 2007, we know of about 74 potable and reclaimed ASR facilities in development, construction, testing, or operation around the State of Florida,” Deuerling says.
ASR wells are tested using injection and removal cycles of varying length. For the initial short-term cycles, which are measured in days, reclaimed water is injected into a well for a few days, stored for a few days, and then recovered for a few days. Midterm cycles are measured in weeks, long-term cycles in months. The cycles grow progressively longer—unless problems are found.
|
Photo: Manatee County |
| Injection-well piping |
ASR wells fail for a variety of reasons, including geochemical changes that increase the arsenic level or salinity of the water. Arsenic and other minerals occur naturally in dolomite and limestone. Resolving these problems—if they can be resolved—will entail considerable expense and the application of technology that either doesn’t yet exist or hasn’t been proved to work on such a large scale.
“Certain chemical environments allow arsenic to be released in Florida aquifers,” says Jonathan Arthur, an assistant state geologist with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. “Typically there is very little oxygen in the aquifer. When oxygen in the injected water is added to existing ground water and rock formations, arsenic may be released from rocks containing pyrite.”
Arsenic is anathema to regulatory agencies. In 2001 the EPA began imposing a new, more stringent arsenic contamination limit of 10 parts per billion for drinking water. (The old limit was 50 parts per billion.) Moreover, water containing excessive arsenic can’t be used for agriculture because arsenic builds up in the soil, in crops grown in arsenic-laden soil, and in people who eat such crops.
Large doses of arsenic can lead to shock and death. Chronic exposure to small doses can cause headache, confusion, nerve damage in the extremities, dark and scaly skin, thickening of the skin on the palms and soles, and white lines across the fingernails.
St. Petersburg’s ASR Well
“St. Petersburg is a peninsula attached to a second peninsula,” says Ralph Craig, a hydrogeologist for the City of St. Petersburg. “We have limited fresh groundwater and are surrounded by salt water. St. Petersburg has no publicly owned fresh-water wellfields. Some local residents have shallow wells 20 or 30 feet deep that pump fresh water from the local surficial aquifer for irrigation.
“We import our drinking water from Tampa Bay Water through an interlocal government agreement that provides wholesale water to the 2.4 million people in three counties—Hillsborough, Pinellas, and Pasco County (which includes New Port Richey). Fresh water is delivered to St. Petersburg through very long pipes. That’s why we’re experimenting with injecting fresh water into the deep wells and hope to have the water storage advantages when we need them.”
Alfredo Crafa, environmental compliance manager for St. Petersburg’s Water Resource Department, describes using ASR for potable water as “the leading edge of technology with reclaimed water. We hope to reduce the potable water demand by increasing the demand for reclaimed water.”
St. Petersburg built its ASR system at its Southwest Water Reclamation Facility near the Eckerd College campus on 54th Avenue South, a site in use since the 1950s. The ASR system to date has cost $1.2 million to plan, construct, and test. It utilized several existing monitor wells. The city received some up-front construction funding from the SWFWMD. Weekly testing of the ASR well and monitor wells costs over $100,000 a year.
St. Petersburg started to distribute reclaimed water in the mid-1970s. Today the city operates four reclaimed water facilities that produce about 36 million gallons per day. This system has over 10,400 active customers and 290 miles of reclaimed water-main lines of various sizes connecting the reclamation facilities to the system’s customers. These lines are separate from the community’s sanitary-sewer lines and potable-water lines.
St. Petersburg’s wells are drilled down through the surface sand and shell formations and the Upper Floridan aquifer into the deeper Suwannee Dolomite and Limestone formations.
“Sanitary sewer water is treated in St. Petersburg’s reclaimed water facilities and turned into reclaimed water,” says Crafa. On average, about 20 million gallons of reclaimed water per day are used in landscape and agricultural spray and irrigation systems. The large distribution loop system has thousands of residential connections, a few commercial clients, multifamily projects, cemeteries, golf courses, parks, and university campuses.
All of St. Petersburg’s reclamation facilities have short-term storage tanks. Craig says the ASR wells are intended to provide additional seasonal storage. “We started construction on our ASR system in 2001,” he says. “It takes several years to obtain an injection-well permit and to construct an ASR. Water cycle testing started in 2005. We’ve been through four complete cycles.”
|
Photo: Manatee County |
| Monitor-well piping |
St. Petersburg does not discharge reclaimed water into its drinking-water aquifers so as not to contaminate them with arsenic and other dissolved solids that occur naturally in the deeper ASR wells. “The EPA definition of underground source of drinking water is less than 10,000 milligrams per liter of total dissolved solids,” Craig says. “The water into which we discharge has tens of thousands of milligrams of total dissolved solids per liter, and it is not regulated as an underground source of drinking water. We monitor our well system extensively to make sure we don’t violate any EPA or health standards.
“As wells go deeper, the naturally occurring water gets saltier. We’re injecting our water below underground sources of drinking water, so we don’t have regulation issues.”
Crafa says the water being injected into the ASR well either stays in place or moves laterally in the Suwannee Limestone formation.
“Injection and recovery build up a fresh-water bubble as we cycle water in and out,” says Craig. “In summer during the rainy season, we fill up voids in the rocks and temporarily displace the salt water that is down there. Fresh water pushes the salt water away from the well. In the dry season, we recover water from the well when it is needed until it becomes salty. We’re trying to build a buffer zone between the naturally occurring salt water and our injected water.”
On a typical injection day, the ASR receives about 1.5 million gallons. During the withdrawal phase of a cycle, a similar amount is removed each day until the amount needed has been recovered. (See Table 1.)
Hillsborough County’s ASR Wells
Hillsborough County’s Water Resource Services built two ASR projects, which together cost $3 million. From 1998 to 2004, one project used water from the Northwest Regional Water Reclamation Facility and the River Oaks Wastewater Treatment Plant. The second, built to support the South County Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant at Port Redwing, about 1,300 feet from Tampa Bay, was shut down before cycle testing could begin.
Rising costs and the new EPA/FDEP arsenic standards contributed to the shutdown. “They were costing more than I wanted to spend on projects I could not guarantee at this stage would work for us,” Hammett says.
Hillsborough County has about 315 miles of reclaimed water lines serving about 15,000 customers—14,700 residential customers and 300 commercial and industrial customers, including Tampa Electric Company’s Big Bend Power Plant.
“In the 1980s,” Hammett says, “it was hard to find users of our reclaimed water. Today about 60% of it is used. Some of our original residential customers pay a flat monthly rate, but we meter all our new clients. We can only accommodate locations close to our reclaimed-water mains. Laying new pipe is expensive.
“All ASR wells go through a lengthy planning, research- and cycle-testing periods that may take years. We were one of the first locations in Florida to try reclaimed ASRs. Our problem is to store water in our wet season to satisfy our clients’ needs in the dry season. We are looking for ways to do this. ASR appeared to offer one solution. Another solution is reclaimed-water reservoirs, but ASR underground sources are preferable because we don’t have to worry about screening or treating for algae, fish, and frogs.
Hillsborough County’s first ASR well was about 450 feet deep. During cycle testing, it yielded water with total dissolved solids and salinity levels high enough to kill grass. That well has been plugged and abandoned. “None of our pretests prepared us for the high salinity levels,” says Hammett. “There must be fractures in the well’s geological formations. Every time you drill for water you test ahead of time, but it is still your best shot.”
South of Tampa Bay
Manatee County, which adjoins Hillsborough and Pinellas counties at the south end of Tampa Bay, encompasses 741 square miles. It has a population of about 307,000, including 54,000 in Bradenton, the county seat and largest city. The county’s drinking water comes from Lake Manatee, a reservoir behind a dam on the Manatee River.
Manatee County’s three sewage-treatment plants receive 23.1 million gallons a day of wastewater—nearly half of St. Petersburg’s volume—and converts it to reclaimed water. Manatee’s Southwest Treatment Plant (built in 1972, upgraded in 1988) is on Bradenton’s southwest side, in a growing residential area close to the publicly owned 18-hole Manatee County Golf Course, the private nine-hole Timber Creek Golf Course, and a 1,600-acre gladiola farm.
Initially, Manatee County limited its distribution of reclaimed water to the adjoining golf course and the gladiola farm. Eventually each treatment plant had its own local distribution system, serving mainly golf courses and agricultural interests. Distribution throughout the county began in late 2006 through a dedicated 28-mile system of main pipes that links the three sewage treatment plants. Smaller mains connect the reclaimed-water system to 960 master-meter clients, including Schroeder-Manatee Ranch Inc. and McClure Farms; several other golf courses; residential communities; and parks.
“We started to develop our ASR in 2001,” says David Shulmister, Manatee County’s wastewater division manager. “We drilled our ASR feasibility project, a Class-V well and a monitor well. We did our first cycle test in December of 2004—11 days of injection, two days of storage, and 12 days of recovery. Our second cycle began in March of 2005—35 days of injection, six days of storage, and 21 days of recovery.
“Arsenic was found in the monitor wells. Arsenic is limited to ten parts per billion, and we were finding 50 to 100 parts per million in our monitor wells.”
The project was placed on indefinite hold because of a conflict between the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and the EPA over whether to allow the potential contamination of underground sources of drinking water. “Some development of arsenic is even seen in a potable well’s monitor wells,” Shulmister says. “The EPA says they can’t have migration of contaminates. The DEP will give us an operating permit if the arsenic goes away, but if it doesn’t, we have to shut down. Our consultant, CH2M Hill, does not recommend that we spend additional money to build additional monitor wells because of what we’re likely to find during cycle testing. The DEP requires us to continue testing our wells once a month, and the arsenic rate in the samples remains the same.”
Shulmister says no one except the Florida Department of Environmental Protection is challenging the EPA rule, and changing it may take years. Meanwhile, Manatee County is exploring other ways to store water for agricultural and residential use, including construction of a new 75-acre lake near the North Wastewater Treatment Plant.
The next two counties south of Manatee—Sarasota and Charlotte—share an ASR system developed at the Englewood Water District’s water reclamation facility, which serves 44.5 square miles of southern Sarasota County and western Charlotte County. It has three wellfields with fresh water and two with brackish water.
The Englewood ASR has a 700-foot well with a 500-foot casing. The storage zone is the uncased 200 feet at the bottom of the well, which is in cycle testing.