Lately it seems like Florida has been attacked from every side
when it comes to environmental destruction at the hands of a corrupt government. At the heart of Florida is a community that seems to never get any reprieve from terrible environmental and public health risks driven by deliberately ignorant policy: the Glades.
It’s early April and Lake Okeechobee’s cyanobacteria bloom is already under way. Along the west side of the lake the bloom is visible by satellite, but here on the east side the bloom so far seems to be the worst around Pahokee. At the Pahokee Marina the bloom is already gathering on the surface in areas of stagnant and slow moving water.
Environmental racism is at play here. Although the cyanobacteria itself doesn’t discriminate, broken policy dictates that particular communities are hurt more than others. It’s been a constant argument with the Florida Department of Health to get adequate warning signs and information out to harmed communities.
We take up every opportunity we get to push for a statewide standard on harmful algal bloom warning signs. An idea that our state refuses to acknowledge so far. We report our cyanobacteria data to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, it goes to Tallahassee, then they are supposed to notify the Department of Health. Right now without a statewide standard it is up to each county’s Department of Health office to choose the sign type and decide location and timing of posting signs.
The result is that some communities are better served than others. Unsurprisingly, black and brown communities such as Belle Glade, Canal Point, and Pahokee are seriously underserved despite being the most hard hit.
The waters here are often subjected to cyanobacteria blooms for 4-5 months out of the year. Yet, these blooms rarely get the media coverage as smaller blooms would get in other communities, especially affluent white communities. This lack of attention likely gives the Department of Health the excuse to choose to do the bare minimum here. These are communities where locals are sustenance fishing. Unlike many communities elsewhere, the locals here are filling up their buckets and coolers with cyanobacteria-contaminated fish for dinner. The poverty here offers no recourse. Hence why the lack of a statewide warning sign standard is environmental racism.
Warning signs were posted throughout the marina last year, all but one of them has since been removed. The sign that remains is faded and barely legible.
At another spot, even more fishermen were catching crappie at the S-352 Spillway in Canal Point. This is one of the most popular sustenance fishing spots this side of the lake, on any given day – cyanobacteria or not – you can find half a dozen people here filling their coolers. We regularly document the annual months-long cyanobacteria blooms that get stuck on a feedback loop here. Today, cyanobacteria wasn’t visible in the water here, likely because it was dissipated throughout the water column due to the significant waterflow of the current Lake Okeechobee discharging toward Lake Worth Lagoon.
Last year over the summer we convinced the Palm Beach County Department of Health to post warning signs here. It was the first time signs have ever been posted. We of course had to settle for the poorly designed signs printed on laminated computer paper, that were stapled to a small wooden post. It took about a week for one of the signs to be run over by a lawnmower. The rest eventually faded, and have since been removed. Last year the Department admitted they knew this was a bad design, but they told us that they were only “temporary” and the more durable, and permanent metal signs were “on order”.
You better believe we haven’t forgotten about those signs.
All this happens in the shadow of perhaps the clearest example of environmental racism, pre-harvest sugar field burning. Big Sugar burns their fields before harvesting sugar cane in order to remove the leaf litter so that more cane can fit onto their trucks, thereby saving some fuel money. This is by choice. Green harvesting exists, meaning cane and leaf litter would fit onto the trucks, however that means less cane per truck and therefore more fuel being used on transport. You don’t have to travel far to see this practice, around the Wal-Mart in Clewiston pre-harvest burning does not happen due to policy. Hence why it is another, and perhaps more on-its-face example of environmental racism.
To learn more about this practice please visit our friend’s website at: http://stopsugarburning.org
During the spring through summer months the glades communities are subjected to poor water quality from cyanobacteria blooms, some of the most toxic organisms on the planet. Then starting in the fall, the baton of environmental and serious public health risk is passed to the sugar fields burning until the next spring – 365 days of environmental racism.