As Florida Power & Light hits the halfway point in a complex effort to retract a massive saltwater plume emanating from its cooling canals at Turkey Point and polluting South Florida’s drinking water aquifer, it’s again facing stubborn obstacles.
A retraction plan continues to fail to remove the deepest layer of the plume while nearby, FPL’s wetlands mitigation bank has run afoul of the legal order governing the clean-up.
In a draft notice of violation obtained by WLRN, Miami-Dade county officials say FPL repeatedly violated orders laid out in a consent decree written in part to hold more freshwater on wetlands adjacent the cooling canals to aid the clean-up and targeted for Everglades restoration.
The county and FPL hammered out the legal settlement in 2015 after more than a half million pounds of salt settled in the aquifer and canal water seeped into Biscayne Bay’s national park waters.
READ MORE: Miami-Dade County and FPL Sparring Again Over Water, Cooling Canals and Turkey Point
The deal required FPL to retract the plume by pumping out the heavier saltwater and injecting it deep beneath the drinking water aquifer, while keeping more freshwater in the wetlands which sit above the plume and also supply the mitigation bank.
“ You have sort of two dual purposes there that don't line up with one another,” said Lisa Spadafina, director of Miami-Dade’s Division of Environmental Resources Management or DERM. “ So that's where we're trying to work together to try to figure out how we can meet the goals, if they are meetable.”
Meanwhile, slow progress on Everglades restoration in the area, called the Model Lands, has stalled a potential bandaid. And that’s created a standoff and a debate: Should limited freshwater in the low-lying area be saved to help prevent the plume from expanding, or instead be used to revive a coastal wetland perhaps already doomed by sea level rise?
FPL disagrees that its operations are over draining wetlands and hampering efforts to retract the plume.
“Over a six-year period, the well system has removed more than 36 billion gallons of hypersaline groundwater, which is a significant reduction,” FPL spokesman Bill Orlove said in a written statement in response to questions. The work has helped dramatically retract the plume in shallow groundwater. But the plume has not budged much from middle or deeper levels.
FPL said it abided by the consent agreement to hold more water in the Model Lands for more than a year to determine the impact on its mitigation bank to the south. But when it became clear flowing less freshwater impacted the coastal bank, it notified Miami-Dade that it intended to return to previous operations.
“It is a false narrative to say that the mitigation bank over drains the wetlands,” FPL said. “The bank’s weir culverts accommodate the natural flow of water through the entirety of the Model Lands.”
Miami-Dade, however, never agreed with the change and challenged the move with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, which regulates wetland mitigation banks.
While county officials have not issued the violation, they have long worried that the mitigation bank operation could jeopardize cleaning up the plume. Former DERM director Lee Hefty said in 2020 the legal consent order he helped craft was intentionally written to accommodate both operations: holding more water in the Model Lands east of U.S. 1 in southern Miami-Dade. The area was among the original pieces of Everglades restoration, to help reconnect freshwater flow to southern Biscayne Bay. As sea levels rise, the effort has become even more urgent and is now part of reconfigured Army Corps project.
Environmental groups echoed county concerns, worried that FPL has failed to adequately address risks from sea level rise. Last year, nuclear regulators agreed to extend the life of the plant’s two reactors another 20 years, making them the first in the nation to be able to operate for 80 years. Miami Waterkeeper is now challenging the extensions.
To deal with the saltwater plume, Miami-Dade has suggested FPL install horizontal wells to pull out salty water from deeper levels farther away from the recovery well pumps.
“ It's a directional drilling that you guide GPS and you will go underneath and get closer to where the groundwater plume is,” said Wilbur Mayorga, chief of Miami-Dade pollution division. “Due to the unique nature of these sites, and access and boundary issues, we're trying to develop tools that can improve the effectiveness of those recovery well systems.”
But FPL is wary and believes the horizontal wells would remove far too much water from the aquifer.
“The extraction of billions of gallons each day of groundwater from the Biscayne aquifer would be harmful to regional water resources and impermissible as a matter of law. We expect that the County would agree,” Orlove said in the written response.
FPL was willing to model the effects of horizontal drilling, he said, but would not endorse a specific plan.
In the meantime, the mitigation bank has proved tricky to resolve.
The bank was originally intended to assist restoration efforts in the Model Lands. FPL had purchased the land as part of its sprawling Turkey Point plant in 1970 but never used the wetlands to the east of the cooling canal or the low-lying coast to the south.
Much of those wetlands had been damaged by flood control: levees and old roads that carved up the basin. The basin itself was cut off from the Everglades that historically provided much-needed freshwater to the southern end of the bay and helped revive shallow seagrass flats that provided a nursery for fish and food for wading birds, young sea turtles and sport fish including permit, bonefish and tarpon. So when the state and federal government created mitigation banking in the 1990s as a way for development on wetlands, FPL moved to convert the area to a mitigation bank.
The first phase was carved out of about 4,200 acres in 1996. A second bank opened in the early 2000s holding another 9,000 acres. Over the years, the utility has sold thousands of credits, which can go for as much as $100,000 each. FPL said that money has helped keep utility bills lower for customers.
When it permitted the bank, FDEP required at least 7,000 acre feet a year of water flowing into the bank. An acre foot equals one foot of water on every acre. Because the basin is now hemmed in by Palm Drive to the north, Card Sound Road to the west and the L31e canal to the east and south, it relies almost entirely on rainwater for freshwater. To get water to the mitigation bank, FPL installed 40 gated culverts, or weirs, along the canal to control water levels.
But after it raised the gates to comply with the consent order, FPL said water flowing into the mitigation bank to the south dropped by nearly 70 percent. That threatened restoration of freshwater sawgrass marshes, tree islands and mangroves, limited how many credits FPL could sell, put FPL at risk for violating FDEP rules. So after a year, FPL switched back to old operations.
Initially, records show freshwater flow remained low. But FPL’s latest monitoring report on bank operations show water draining from the wetlands to the mitigation bank has dramatically surged in recent years, climbing to more than 32,000 acre feet last year. That’s well over three feet of water on every acre in the mitigation bank and more than a foot removed from every acre across the Model Lands.
County officials say that’s now allowing saltwater to flow back into the freshwater marshes and the canal to the north.
In its draft violation, Miami-Dade found in February 2022 and again in February 2023, FPL set the culvert weirs below allowed levels. County inspectors found saltwater flowing back into the freshwater side and in October 2023 found the saltwater had contaminated a nearby canal, the L-31e.
In a letter to the Army Corps asking to change operations of a gate across the canal, county officials documented regular spikes in saltwater in the canal. As part of an Everglades restoration project to keep more water in Everglades National Park to the west, the gate to drain was supposed to open at higher levels. That would also keep freshwater in the marshes higher.
Even with all the water flowing to the mitigation bank, recovery of the coastal wetlans has been spotty as it battles rising sea levels. In areas targeted for reviving freshwater sawgrass marshes, less than 15 percent have sawgrass, although mangroves are thriving in saltwater areas. Scientists call these areas with sparse vegetation along the coast “white zones,” because aerial photographs literally show strips of sparsely grown white between the coast and marshes. With shallow water, they are typically areas where mangroves can take root, begin to again build up land and fend off hurricanes. But if water is too deep, mangroves can’t root.
Now that the dry season is nearing an end, Spadafina said county inspectors will take another look at the impact from operations.
”I’m waiting to hear from those results what our next steps are going to be in terms of whether we are going to take any enforcement action against FPL,” she said.
If the Army Corps agrees to raise triggers on the gate on the L31e canal, so that water remains higher, FPL says it would keep its 40 culverts higher as required in the consent order. But only if regulators, including FDEP and the Army Corps, don’t hold the utility liable for any impacts to the coastal wetlands.
Ideally, Spadafina said, FPL could flow water to the mitigation bank for part of the year without worsening saltwater intrusion.
“There might be a time where they can flow water through these culverts that's not going to exacerbate this saltwater intrusion,” she said. “But we haven't gotten there yet because we still have all these other things at play that are sort of exacerbating this issue.”
Sign up for WLRN’s environment newsletter Field Notes to receive our insider’s guide for living in South Florida’s changing landscape. Get original reporting and recaps, with context, delivered to your inbox every Friday. Subscribe here.
