The Wakulla County couple whose proposed water bottling facility has twice been voted down by the Wakulla County Commission have joined forces with environmental consultant Paul Johnson and attorney Allison DeFoor to give their plan an environmentally pretty face and sell it to the public.  These new company partners attempted to assemble scientific and legal experts during two October public workshops to lend credence to their plan. 

Their Wakulla Springs Bottled Water team hired well-respected hydrogeologist, Dr. Todd Kincaid, to address the concern that the pumping operation might harm Wakulla Springs by taking water from the cave system that feeds the Springs.  Because of the unique location of the wells, Dr. Kincaid explained that the wells will draw water from the Wakulla Springs system only in high flow conditions.  In low flow conditions, the wells will draw from the Spring Creek system to the south, the largest flowing spring in the entire State.

Since the October workshops, we’ve now learned that the Spring Creek springs have apparently stopped running and that the spring boils have completely disappeared.  The Wakulla News ( October 19, 2006 ) quotes the same Dr. Kincaid as saying, “It definitely seems to be that the hydrological conditions in the region have changed.” 

It seems clear that even the best research scientists do not yet understand our region’s hydrogeology, and that the foundation on which the would-be bottlers built their argument has been shattered.  But don’t expect this news to stop them.  They know how to spin.

The company’s land use attorney addressed the public’s concern that a large factory, with 24/7 noise, lights and trucks does not belong in a rural residential neighborhood.  Citizens are opposed to “spot zoning” and have indicated again and again that they want industry located in areas already zoned industrial, preserving the county’s rural character.  The company’s plan is to create a whole new land use category just for water bottling plants, circumventing the necessity of rezoning the site industrial, thus achieving the same effect as “spot zoning,” and creating perceived legitimacy for a set of wells that never should have been drilled in a rural residential area in the first place.   

The proposed bottling plant, if approved, would apply for greater and greater water withdrawals in the future.  Their current permit is for 70,900 gallons per day, but their pumping capacity is 608,000 gallons per day, which equates to 200 semi tractor-trailers going up and down Wakulla County roads every day.  The company is calling the proposed  plant “clean industry,” but the trucking industry it would spawn would be polluting and noxious.

We at Heart of the Earth feel strongly that our groundwater is a public natural resource, part of the Commons, and not a commodity to be sold for private profit.  Once water is removed from its watershed, it is gone forever, as are the beneficial effects to the ecosystem from which it was taken.  Bottled spring water is particularly heinous, as it steals water from, in this case, Wakulla Springs, the Wakulla River and Apalachee Bay .  (Many brands of spring water – Aquafina and Desani, among others, are actually just bottled tap water run through extra filtration.)  Spring water reaps the biggest profits for bottling corporations. We find it deeply troubling (grotesque) that the Wakulla Springs Bottled Water Company boasts that its label would promote tourism of the very Spring from whose waters it would steal to make a small group of people very wealthy.  Calling this industry “white glove, sustainable and eco-friendly” is the kind of corporate double-speak that only the uninformed swallow. 

Which is a worry.  The bottled water industry’s hugely successful media campaign of the last decade has convinced much of the public that bottled water is safer and healthier than ordinary tap water.  Heart of the Earth will soon be posting the truth about bottled water on our website.  We will be depending on our local supporters to take a stand at upcoming (January 2007) Wakulla County Commission meetings and zoning meetings to defeat this unsustainable, wasteful, and unwanted water bottling plant for the third and hopefully, final time.  Stay tuned.

Letter to the Editor (Tallahassee Democrat)