Residents: Rubio Hasn’t ‘Done Shit’ in ‘Florida’s Flint’
Residents: Rubio Hasn’t ‘Done Shit’ in ‘Florida’s Flint’
Residents in coastal communities in Florida say they have appealed to their senator to help them with a growing local ecological disaster and have been largely ignored.
If Sen. Marco Rubio loses the Florida primary next Tuesday, it won’t be because of the number of campaign offices he opened or the TV ads he didn’t buy.
Instead, it likely will be because of the kind of senator that Rubio’s Florida constituents believe he has been. Frustrated residents of several coastal Florida communities say they see a man who is friendly but unread, ambitious but unengaged, and widely discussed nationally but almost entirely absent from his own state as it suffers from an ongoing ecological and economic disaster.
“We have a Flint, Michigan, going on here in Florida in slow motion and Marco Rubio hasn’t done shit,” says Marty Baum, executive director of the Indian Riverkeeper in Jensen Beach, Florida. Baum is the sort of salty environmentalist you’d expect to criticize a Republican senator. But he’s a lifelong Republican, angry with what he sees as a disaster unfolding in front of him and few leaders, especially Rubio, doing anything to stop it.
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The Flint-like catastrophe Baum is referring to is the routine inundation of some of Florida’s most precious waterways with polluted water from Lake Okeechobee in Central Florida. The controlled water releases by the Army Corps of Engineers are meant to preserve the Herbert Hoover Dike, which surrounds the massive lake, from breaching or breaking.
But unusually heavy rains in the last several years have seen the Corps sending up to 2 billion gallons of water per day west toward the Gulf of Mexico and east toward the Atlantic Ocean. Heavy with pollution from agricultural runoff, the eastward freshwater flows into the brackish waters of the St. Lucie River, the Indian River Lagoon, and eventually to Atlantic Ocean, where it was never meant to be.
The result has been massive algae blooms, brown tides, and the transformation of the water from a faint beige transparency to sludge the color of a strong cup of coffee. Sixty percent of the plant life has died off. Manatees and dolphins are dying at an alarming rate. Tourists to Florida’s famed Treasure Coast are warned from one day to the next not to touch the water lapping up on the shore.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/14/residents-rubio-hasn-t-done-shit-in-florida-s-flint.html
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