Florida's Ocean Sewage Pipes Were Supposed to Retire. They Didn't.

The most important piece of outdoor gear I own is a hose zip-tied to a cedar post behind my house in Sarasota. Kayaks come and go. The outdoor shower is forever.

I was a kayak guide for years, which mostly meant explaining to visitors that the dark water in the Myakka is tannins from leaves and is fine. It's tea. Nature's tea.

What Lionfish Extermination Corp filmed this week is not tea.

The crew, a nonprofit that does invasive lionfish removal and education (per their own bio), went down off Miami, tagged the spot as Government Cut, and found what their caption calls "this many poop pipes in one spot." Then vents. Then more pipes. Their opening line is "Holy hopping poop Geyser's Batman!", which is the most accurate sentence anyone has written about wastewater in years. Watch it, ideally before breakfast:

That's a team with more than a million followers on TikTok using its dive time to show people what is actually down there. FWC encourages people to remove lionfish from Florida waters because they're invasive and hard on native marine life. These folks do that on purpose, and then they swim past the sewer and bring a camera. Go follow them.

The deadline was real

The caption says the pipes "were supposed to stop running December 31, 2025." That date is written into state law. In 2008 the Legislature created the Leah Schad Memorial Ocean Outfall Program, now numbered section 403.086(10) of the Florida Statutes. It banned new ocean outfalls, froze the existing ones at their 2008 permitted capacity, and set the end date: discharging domestic wastewater through an ocean outfall "is prohibited after December 31, 2025."

The Legislature's own findings say these discharges waste water that could be reused, and that discharging through them "compromises the coastal environment, quality of life, and local economies." That's a state government saying, in writing, that it's gross. I respect it.

The law also told every utility on an outfall to reuse at least 60 percent of its old outfall flow by that same date. The state's environmental agency called the whole schedule a 17-year glidepath. People have planned weddings in less time, and the weddings had working plumbing.

There is a side door. After 2025 an outfall can still run as a backup, when demand for reclaimed water drops (wet weather, mostly) or to handle peak flows, and the peak-flow part is capped at 5 percent of the old baseline on a five-year rolling average. So "stop" in this law means "stop, mostly."

Where these pipes are (not here)

Before anyone cancels a Siesta Key Saturday: every one of these outfalls is on Florida's Atlantic side. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection's 2020 progress report to the Governor and Legislature puts all six along the southeast coast. North to south:

• Boynton/Delray Beach (the South Central Regional plant)
• Boca Raton
• Broward County (the North Regional plant)
• Hollywood (shared with Cooper City and the Town of Davie)
• Miami North (Miami-Dade Water and Sewer)
• Miami Central (Miami-Dade Water and Sewer)

Add up the 2003 to 2007 baseline flows in that report's own table and you get roughly 290 million gallons a day. A day. I did the math twice and then went and stood under the outdoor shower for a while with my clothes on.

The Gulf side has its own line in the same statute. Sarasota Bay, Little Sarasota Bay, Roberts Bay and Lemon Bay are on a short list of waters where a sewage plant can't discharge anything without advanced waste treatment. That's not a promise the bay is perfect. It's a rule about what's allowed to go in, and I'm glad it's there.

The plan: send it down about a kilometer

The caption mentions "terrific plans to pump the garbage water deep into the Earth instead." That's a Class I injection well. FDEP describes them as wells that put waste below the lowermost underground source of drinking water. Florida has more than 230 active Class I wells, and most of them take secondary-treated effluent from sewage plants. According to the EPA, about 30 percent of all Class I wells in the country are municipal wastewater wells, and those are located exclusively in Florida. Once again, we lead the nation in something.

Miami-Dade spells out its version in its own 2025 annual report to the EPA and FDEP. At the Central District plant, industrial wells were already diverting about 30 million gallons a day away from the outfall. Nine new municipal injection wells are built, but they stay sealed until a pump station is finished, and that pump station's bid advertisement was anticipated in 2026. At the North District plant, four existing wells typically cut daily outfall flows by 50 to 70 percent, and five new wells are complete and waiting on their pump station.

So the holes are drilled. The plumbing to the holes is the holdup. Anyone who has waited on a plumber in Florida understands this on a spiritual level.

How deep is "deep into the Earth"? At the North District plant, the U.S. Geological Survey puts the injection zone, called the Boulder Zone, roughly 870 to 1,050 meters below sea level, in water about as salty as the ocean.

The video ends on "I don't know which one's worse though?" I'm a former kayak guide. I'm not qualified to answer that. The people who are qualified write 27-page reports, and I read one this morning, and I'd still tell you to watch the video instead.

What I'm doing about it

Watching it a third time, apparently. Following Lionfish Extermination Corp, and their link page is where you can chip in for the lionfish work. Then the outdoor shower. It's going to be a long one.

— Brooke