A PBS documentary by local divers shows the effects that growth above ground is having underground.
By DAN DeWITT
Published August 31, 2003
On the screen, two divers drift through the aquifer in Central Florida.
The cave is as spacious as a living room. The water, as residents with even a dim awareness of the state's geology would expect, is absolutely clear.
Suddenly, though, divers Jill Heinerth and Tom Morris come upon a sight that, if not for the regulators in their mouths, would have made their jaws drop. It's a 55-gallon drum, partly buried by silt.
"A huge oil drum in the middle of a cave. Can you believe it?" Heinerth says.
This scene appears in a documentary, Water's Journey, produced by Heinerth, who lives in Hudson. It also makes the film's main point: Florida's once-pristine groundwater is increasingly degraded by human activity.
"Deep in the veins of mother Earth," the narrator states in the film's opening moments, "there is trouble lurking."
The documentary, partly financed by the state and purchased for distribution by the Public Broadcasting Service, was a collaborative effort between Heinerth and Wes Skiles, a filmmaker and photographer who has spent most of his life capturing images of Florida springs.
Skiles enlisted Heinerth to work at his company, Karst Productions, and to produce the documentary after diving with her and her husband, Paul Heinerth, owner of the Scuba West dive shop in Hudson.
"Paul has been a good friend of mine for almost 30 years," Skiles said. He met Jill Heinerth during the exploration of Wakulla Spring in North Florida in 1998. She later joined him in the filming of Antarctic icebergs.
He was impressed by her qualifications as a diver - she is a member of the Women Divers Hall of Fame - and as a professional. A native of Canada, Heinerth, 38, has a communications degree from York University in Toronto and formerly owned an advertising agency there.
"That's a rare combination of talents," Skiles said.
Heinerth, like Skiles, said she has a special attachment to Water's Journey because it gives her a chance to educate people about what she regards as the most valuable resource in her adopted state - the Floridan Aquifer, which runs from the Panhandle to north of Lake Okeechobee and supplies most of the area's drinking water.
"It feels like it's the most important thing we've done in our lives," Heinerth said.
"A lot of people used to think this came down from North Carolina or Georgia," Skiles said of the groundwater.
"Now we know this is fairly shallow, very local, and every new development, every new activity changes that spring - every time we dump a cup of gasoline in our yard, every time fertilizer is used incorrectly."
This is not exactly news. For several years, scientists have warned of climbing nitrate levels in some of the state's most famous springs and spring-fed rivers, including the Weeki Wachee and Rainbow.
But the damage is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Several Florida springs are so loaded with the nitrogen used in fertilizer that their water is considered toxic, Heinerth said. And elevated nitrate levels are the main cause of the rafts of algae that have appeared in recent years at the source of the Weeki Wachee.
"This was once a vibrant, healthy spring," Skiles said when he visited the river for a workshop on groundwater quality in May. "Now it is like somebody in critical care."
Water's Journey, completed earlier this year, was shown at the workshop, and at similar gatherings of community leaders around the state.
But it will soon reach a much wider audience. The documentary, which was commissioned in 2000 by a state task force that studied groundwater quality, will be aired on PBS stations throughout Florida and is being pitched to stations nationwide.
It is scheduled to air on WEDU-Ch. 3 at 8 p.m. Oct. 16 and at 2:30 p.m. Oct. 19. The first showing will be followed by a locally produced program, What Have You Been Drinking?, said Heather Mudrick, spokeswoman for the station.
With such a wide audience in mind, Heinerth and Skiles said they did not want to pack their documentary with statistics or complicated science.
"The goal was to create an educational tool that was informative and fun to watch and would protect the spring resources," Heinerth said.
That means one point is made repeatedly: The land above is directly linked to the water below.
For most of the film, Heinerth and Morris swim in the caves - under western Pasco County and near the Karst Productions office in High Springs - while Skiles and an electrical engineer, Brian Pease, follow their progress over land.
The film switches back and forth between scenes above and below ground.
Though the message is simple, the equipment is not. The footage is filmed in high-definition video, which produces images so clear that even frames taken from the video are as vivid as still pictures. And the monitoring device, which Pease created for the documentary, uses low-frequency radio waves to detect the divers' exact location.
"Wes ... needed a piece of equipment that didn't exist," the narrator says near the start of the film.
What is most striking, initially, is the contrast between the clutter above and the pristine beauty below.
The divers descend into a sinkhole northwest of Gainesville and then into a vertical shaft of air-clear water.
"It looks like we're fixing to dive down through 50-million years of limestone," Morris said on film. They then begin to follow a horizontal passage barely high enough to allow them and their tanks to pass.
Skiles, accompanied by Pease holding a constantly beeping monitor, follows their path to a stretch of U.S. 441 near Interstate 75.
"We're now on the edge of society," Skiles said, using a generous description for the sprawl-choked highway.
Skiles points out how the runoff from the roads and parking lots can eventually reach the aquifer. He and Pease then enter a barbecue restaurant, passing surprised customers at the salad bar.
Later in the film, Pease and Skiles - again walking directly above the divers - enter the Hudson Bowl bowling alley and walk the manicured golf course in the Beacon Woods development.
Though the divers took no measurements, they knew from previous studies that the development on the land above had allowed nitrates to seep into the water.
"Some of the worst pollutants, including the nitrogen and mercury, are invisible," Morris says.
"So I guess clear doesn't necessarily mean clean," says Heinerth.
The two also come across contaminants that can easily be seen. Shortly after passing the oil barrel, they see truck tires that had been dumped into a sinkhole and carried deep in the cave by the current.
When they emerge to meet Skiles and Pease at the sinkhole, they find it a stew of foul-smelling chemicals.
"That's roofing tar and antifreeze," Skiles points out, once he and Pease had walked down to the water.
"What (people) are doing is putting this down in their drinking water - the very poisons they are trying to get rid of."
The sight of garbage dumped into the spring made a lasting impression with some people who have seen the film.
"One thing I really found amazing was the amount of debris in the sinks that they came into, and the amount of debris that washes into the sinkholes," said Hernando County Commission Chairwoman Betty Whitehouse, who saw Water's Journey at the workshop in Hernando.
That is an important lesson in the film, Heinerth said. But it may be even more important for people to realize that they can cause harm with less willful acts, such as applying a bit too much fertilizer.
The public may know the general concept of groundwater, she said, "but I think they would really be surprised to see the water flowing under the 14th hole of the Beacon Woods (Golf Club). ... They probably don't understand that what they do on their lawn will affect their drinking water in a year."
- Dan DeWitt can be reached at 352 754-6116. Send e-mail to dewitt@sptimes.com
Viewing times
The documentary Water's Journey will air on WEDU-Ch. 3 at 8 p.m. Oct. 16 and at 2:30 p.m. Oct. 19. The first showing will be followed by a locally produced program, What Have You Been Drinking?
