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Before
EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman resigned from her office, she
had decided to sign off on a rule-making decision drawn up by EPA water
administrators declaring Florida exempt from certain provisions of the
Safe Drinking Water Act.
Published in the Federal Register on May 5, the exemption will permit
Florida to pollute drinking water aquifers with inadequately treated
waste through municipal underground injection control (UIC) wells.
The issue arose when the federal agency advised the Florida Department
of Environmental Protection (FDEP) in the 1970s to initiate a program
of disposal of municipal sewage and industrial waste by injection
underground via deep injection wells.
A Fortune 500 engineering consulting firm, CH2M Hill, had assured all
parties the deeply injected waste effluent would be contained by a
geological barrier and would not commingle with drinking water aquifers.
Since then, over 120 Class 1 UIC wells have been built in south
Florida. FDEP officials estimate the flow of injected waste at over 400
million gallons daily (MGD); environmental groups contend it is closer
to one billion MGD.
Despite those early assurances that containment of the wastes would be
no problem, EPA and FDEP monitoring tests have shown the UIC waste is
migrating into aquifers used for drinking water.
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