FORT MYERS, Fla. — A city official is advocating for new state guidelines that would allow treated wastewater to be injected into aquifers, potentially solving multiple water management challenges.
"We already have access to reclaim water. We've had reclaimed water for a number of years," said Jason Sciandra, Assistant Public Utilities Director for the city. "What I talked about in the meeting today was about direct potable and indirect potable reuse, that's basically taking the waste water, putting it through additional levels of treatment, and then being able to use that for drinking water purposes."
Watch Fort Myers Community Correspondent Miyoshi Price' explain the proposal:
The proposal focuses specifically on indirect potable reuse guidelines that would enable water diverted from the Caloosahatchee River to be treated and used to recharge aquifers.
"What I really am called to action on for the state is to start providing us indirect potable reuse guidelines," Sciandra said. "What I really would like to see is, for all this water that we're being required to take off of the Caloosahatchee River, I'd like to be able to treat that to a high level, put it in the aquifer, and recharge the aquifer so that we can maintain the aquifers levels and water quality over time."
Current expectations suggest that extensive treatment would be required both before injection and after recovery, creating what the official sees as unnecessary redundancy.
"I think the big challenge is that the way we're hearing it's going to come down, is going to be a lot of additional treatment requirements before we can inject and what we're going to do is we're going to treat that water basically to drinking water standards," Sciandra said. "We're gonna inject it and then when it comes back out of the ground in recovered form, we're gonna have to treat it again."
The official argues that since the target aquifers aren't currently used for drinking water, regulations should be more flexible.
"I think the reality is, is that with the aquifers that we're going to recharge, they're not drinking water aquifers, and for that purpose, we should have a better ability and a more flexibility be able to put that reclaim water in there and then recover that for drinking water purposes," Sciandra said.
While implementation may be years away, the official remains optimistic about the potential benefits of this approach to water management.
Sciandra went in to say in a statement:
"By providing guidelines on indirect potable reuse, the state would be providing a framework for the City to develop it’s reclaimed water portfolio including the Central Reclaimed Water Expansion project. Currently, our two options for utilizing this facility when it is completed will be sending reclaimed water to customers for irrigation purposes or injecting it 3,000 feet down into the earth. I’d like to see a third option where highly treated reclaimed water can be used to recharge our drinking water aquifer."
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