THE ACREAGE, FL-- Wells.
If you can't get your water piped in, you dig a hole in the ground and look for it.
For 43 years Win Parker has been doing just that.
He says below the surface, Florida is not an ideal place from which to pull drinking water and The Acreage ranks near the bottom.
"As far as quality of water, its very poor as far as organic material," Wells says.
Meaning, the soil is vulnerable to pesticides and toxic runoff from agriculture
As he wraps up a project in West Palm Beach, the pipe he's working on will be 60 feet below the surface, firmly embedded in limestone.
If he were in the The Acreage, it would be embedded in salt.
Too much salt makes water undrinkable.
"The rock pit out there ...they found Mastodon bones, sharks teeth. That's interesting but not good because there's so much chloride," he says.
So to get to the underwater aquifer and avoid salt a lot of Acreage wells really just scratch the surface compared to wells in other parts of the county that go down 60 to 80 feet and hit limestone, which like a sponge, filters out contaminants.
"Some of these wells are very shallow but if they weren’t shallow, you'd have no fresh water at all," Parker says.
What's the downside to shallow?
"Organic? A lot of organic material intrudes," he says.
Win Parker suspects agriculture, more than industry, could be behind The Acreage problems. He also says there's a human factor. Once you have a well you'd better be very diligent about maintaining it.
"They should have a bacteria test once a year. And softeners, carbon filters. That has a lot to do with the quality of water," he says.
