Conserving Water Is a Year-Round Responsibility

by Commissioner Jeff Koons

With the summer rainy pattern returning, area lakes, ponds and canals are filling back up. But it doesn’t mean you can water your lawn whenever you feel like it. Outdoor watering restrictions remain in effect and for good reason. We must all do our part to conserve this precious resource.

Residential water conservation is just one piece to a very complex puzzle: What can be done to ensure that enough fresh, clean water will be available for everyone today and tomorrow?

First, you should understand that county government does not impose water restrictions. That is done by the South Florida Water Management District. But we enforce the restrictions through our Code Enforcement Division. Several other agencies also investigate complaints and issue fines. Recently, the County Commission agreed to double its fines for violating mandatory water-use restrictions -- up to $250 per offense, depending on whether the case is heard by a court judge or a Code Enforcement special master. We did this not to pad the county coffers, but because mandatory restrictions target a completely preventable type of water waste.

Approximately half of all the water used by residents is for outdoor irrigation -- literally dumping water on the ground. Landscaping your yard with drought-resistant grass and shrubs eliminates the need for most outdoor watering. Making sure your faucets and irrigation system are leak-free, and watering only in the early morning or late evening hours will save water, too.

Some people would argue that because residential consumption uses up only 5 percent of the total amount of fresh water we receive naturally, government shouldn’t pick on the little guy. Instead, why not do something about the billions of gallons collected in drainage canals and then dumped in the ocean? Well, it’s an engineering issue.

The majority of canals in South Florida were dug decades ago to drain the land for farming and later for residential development. They are flood-control canals intended to move large volumes of water -- stormwater runoff -- quickly. For the most part, this gravity-based system works quite well, but it only moves water in one direction, east to the ocean. It would be astronomically expensive to try to reverse the system with enough pumps to move all that water west into Lake Okeechobee.

Not only that, drainage canals have limited capacity. In order to move stormwater swiftly, drainage canals are shallow, on average around eight feet deep. Water storage facilities need to be much deeper with little or no water movement to be effective.

The geology and high water tables throughout South Florida make it very difficult to build deep-water storage facilities. But there is one place in central Palm Beach County that holds great promise for large-scale water storage -- the limestone pits near Lion Country Safari.

As always, I welcome your comments and questions. Please feel free to contact me or my staff at 355-2202.