Enforcement Collapse, Injected Sewage Coming Back Up, and more
- IRNA
- 11 minutes ago
- 7 min read
Florida Logged 1,593 Sewage Spills Last Year
and Answered With 90 Enforcement Actions
That ratio (roughly eighteen spills for every enforcement action) is the clearest picture of what environmental protection looks like in Florida right now. And 2025 was the better year. In 2024, the state recorded 2,280 pollution incidents and brought just 63 domestic wastewater enforcement actions, a rate of about thirty-six to one. Between 2000 and early 2022, more than 2.4 billion gallons of wastewater spilled onto Florida land and into Florida water.
Those numbers come from a new report by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and Waterkeepers Florida, drawing on the state's own Department of Environmental Protection data going back thirty-seven years. The picture it paints is not one of a regulator overwhelmed by a sudden crisis. It is a regulator that stopped showing up.
The top-line figure: DEP brought 1,587 enforcement actions in 2010. By 2013 that had collapsed to 210. Last year's total of 755 is being described as a recovery, and it is an improvement, but it is still less than half of where the state was fifteen years ago. Meanwhile Florida added roughly 4.7 million residents over that same span (18.8 million in 2010, an estimated 23.5 million in 2025). More people, more development, more discharge, less enforcement.
The dredge and fill program tells the same story. Before 2011, the state reliably opened at least 200 wetland excavation and filling cases a year. In 2014 it opened 41, the lowest in agency history. In 2020 the EPA handed Florida authority over the federal Section 404 program despite loud warnings that the state lacked the capacity to run it, and a federal court stripped that authority back in February 2024 after conservation groups (including St. Johns Riverkeeper and Miami Waterkeeper) sued.
Here is the part that should bother anyone who swims, fishes, or drinks water in this state. Of the waterbodies DEP assessed for its 2026 Integrated Water Quality Assessment, 52 percent are not meeting their water quality standards. Only 30 percent are. The dominant pollutants are fecal bacteria and nutrients, which is to say failing septic systems, sewer overflows, livestock, fertilizer, and stormwater. These are known sources with known fixes.
So the fewer-enforcement-actions trend cannot be explained by fewer violations. The water says otherwise.
Then there is the policy layer. Governor DeSantis vetoed the Safe Waterways Act in June 2024, a bill that would have required health advisories when bacteria levels made a beach unsafe and 24-hour public notification of contamination. Weakened versions in both chambers died on June 16, 2025. The message to local governments is that they are free not to tell you the water is dangerous.
Infrastructure money alone will not fix this. Without enforcement, a polluter's cheapest option is to keep polluting and fines become the cost of doing business.
PFAS Well Water Testing
IRNA is offering free, certified lab testing for PFAS ("forever chemicals") in private drinking water wells. Sign up, submit your water sample, and get your results, plus learn what they mean for your health.
We are especially searching for wells at or near Blue Cypress Lake, Fellsmere, Gifford, and Wabasso.
There are only a few tests left! Reach out today!
Open to Indian River County home and business owners on private wells only (not connected to municipal water). Questions? Contact Missy@IndianRiverNA.com
Candidate Questionnaire: County Commission Responses
IRNA, Pelican Island Audubon Society, and the Clean Water Coalition sent questionnaires to every candidate running for the Board of County Commissioners. We're running the responses one more week for anyone who missed them.
Every candidate got the same questions on the same day with the same deadline, submitted through an online form. Responses are published unedited so voters hear candidates in their own words. As 501(c)(3) organizations, we don't endorse candidates (this is voter education, plain and simple).
The questions covered the property tax amendment (Amendment 3/HJR 1F) and its impact on water infrastructure funding, sustaining Lagoon restoration under funding pressure, water quality in the Indian River Lagoon and Blue Cypress Lake, long-term potable water supply and utility expansion, and city-county collaboration on annexation and growth.
Five candidates responded:
Bob McPartlan (Dist 2)
Jennifer A. Pippin (Dist 2)
Daniel Brooks Robinson (Dist 2)
Marc Jaffe (Dist 4)
Deryl Byron Loar (Dist 4)
Our thanks to all five for taking the time. Their answers help Indian River County residents get to the ballot box better informed.
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Injecting treated sewage underground only works if it stays underground, and in the Lower Keys it isn't staying. Divers with Friends of the Lower Keys put a camera on the seabed off Stock Island and found effluent from a private utility's wells bubbling back up through the limestone about 300 feet away, inside the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, with manatees crowding in to drink it.
The proof is in the sucralose (the artificial sweetener passes through both the human gut and the treatment plant unchanged, so finding it offshore often means you've found human waste). "Treated" is not "clean" here: that water still carries nitrogen and phosphorus, plus microplastics, PFAS, and discarded pharmaceuticals. It works like this: effluent is fresh water, fresh water is buoyant, and Florida limestone is full of holes.
That geology doesn't stop at the Seven Mile Bridge. Florida has more than 180 active Class I injection wells, and most of those facilities are disposing of secondary-treated effluent from domestic wastewater plants. At Miami-Dade's North District plant, USGS found injected effluent had moved out of the Boulder Zone entirely, pushed upward by buoyancy and injection pressure through a karst collapse feature into shallower permeable zones, with a leak in a monitoring well letting it reach the Upper Floridan aquifer.
That's the same aquifer system a lot of Florida drinks from, and that was a deep, properly cased well (not a Keys-style shallow one). The Keys just make the failure visible because it surfaces in twelve feet of water where a diver can film it. Everywhere else, we're taking containment on faith.
Which brings it home. Indian River County's own regional plants mostly avoid this: effluent from the Central Regional facility goes to percolation ponds or spray irrigation reuse, and the county's comprehensive plan explicitly treats reuse as the better option because it keeps effluent out of the ground. The City of Vero Beach is the one injecting. Most of the city plant's effluent goes to golf course and residential irrigation, with the remainder disposed of by deep injection well.
That's a Class I system (one deep injection well, IW-1, and a single monitor well) taking both reverse-osmosis concentrate from the water plant and secondarily treated municipal wastewater, and in June 2025 the city was approving change orders for mechanical integrity testing and repair work on it.
None of that is a scandal, and Vero's well is a genuinely different animal from a 90-foot hole in Keys limestone. But Miami-Dade shows that "deep and cased" isn't the same as "sealed," and one monitor well plus periodic integrity testing is a thin way to answer the only question that matters: where does it actually go?
Finally, it's worth nothing that our baseline geohydrology data is from 1988. Before the county approves another decade of growth on top of it, we ought to know what's under us.
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