‘Welcome to Florida’ billboard highlights bears, toxic water, dead manatees

TITUSVILLE, Fla. – A number of simplistic billboards tucked among the many pines alongside Interstate 95 close to Titusville welcome motorists to Florida: “House to bears. Poisonous Water. Lifeless manatees.”

The indicators present a rest room draining instantly into the lagoon, with a useless manatee, a sea turtle and some fish, Information 6 accomplice Florida At present reported.

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“RIP 1,874 manatees 2021-2022,” the billboards say.

They’re paid for by the Bear Warriors United, the identical nonprofit group suing the Florida Division of Environmental Safety, accusing the company of failing to implement clear water rules by permitting too many septic tanks and sewage spills to foul and kill the ocean cow’s staple seagrass weight-reduction plan.

Septic tanks are among the many high contributors of extra nitrogen and phosphorus to the lagoon, research lately present. An excessive amount of of these two vitamins fuels algae blooms that block daylight to seagrass, killing the manatees most necessary meals supply.

Bear Warriors, which normally acts on behalf of black bears, combating to finish hunts, has taken up the manatee trigger within the wake of 800 manatee deaths final 12 months and a file 1,101 manatees deaths in 2021.

By way of Jan. 20 of this 12 months there have been 56 manatee deaths, together with eight deaths in Brevard. There have been 97 manatee deaths throughout that very same timeframe in 2021, and 68 deaths in 2018. The five-year common for a similar timeframe is 54 deaths, in keeping with Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Fee statistics.

Environmentalists’ lawsuits greater than twenty years in the past led to Florida creating statewide arrays of go-slow zones, in hopes it will save the ocean cows from being killed by strikes from rushing boats.

However air pollution that fuels extra algae saved killing manatees, anyway.

Now environmentalists are suing the state once more, this time to cease the air pollution that boating teams lengthy had warned was a a lot greater long-term risk to the species than boats going too quick.

The manatee dying toll acquired so unhealthy that by in March 2021, the Nationwide Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had declared the die-off an Uncommon Mortality Occasion.

Then, in a first-of-its form pilot mission to attempt to stave off additional hunger, state and federal biologists fed manatees on the Florida Energy & Gentle energy plant final winter and thru the top of March 2022.

Bear Warrior’s initially filed go well with sought an injunction requiring DEP to:

• “Completely stop its authorization and allowing of the discharge of nitrogen from septic tanks and wastewater vegetation” into the northern Indian River Lagoon;

• An order requiring DEP to “present medical monitoring and veterinarian care along with correct dietary forage to all manatees within the northern lagoon till enough seagrass can maintain manatees there;

• Orders enjoining DEP from issuing approvals for septic tanks or sewer plant hookups for brand new development throughout the northern lagoon watershed;

• Declare that DEP has “by the way taken” manatees within the northern lagoon throughout the that means of the Endangered Species Act. The federal authorities defines an incidental take as unintentional however not surprising actions that end in a threatened species being killed, harassed or in any other case harmed.

“DEP has complete regulatory management over sewage,” Lesley Blackner, an legal professional on the case, stated through electronic mail. “Whether or not it goes into septic tanks or sewage remedy vegetation that dump instantly into the IRL (Indian River Lagoon) throughout rain occasions or leak into groundwater as a result of the system is overloaded and pipes break and rust. Using the IRL as a rest room has killed the lagoon and all of the creatures that decision it residence, together with manatees, Florida’s most iconic marine species.”