NOT ALL POLLUTERS ARE WHERE YOU'D EXPECT
From a story by Frank Stephenson in
FSU Research in Review
The mercury problem is not so simple, Florida State's and other scientists have found.
A few years ago, protestors scaled incinerator stacks and unfurled banners saying "Mercury is Rising" and "Don't Burn Florida." A number of arrests were made.
The protests were understandable. Incinerators in South Florida, coal-fueled power plants near Tampa, and even a car-battery recycling plant near Marianna, are guilty. They produce mercury that helps kill fish in fresh water and, ultimately, mammals, even humans.
But they're only partly guilty maybe about 15 percent, if the South Florida incinerators are typical.
The real problem comes to Florida from seven or eight, maybe 12, miles above the ground, swept along by world-traveling winds that pick up pollutants and other exotic materials from several continents.
The winds have been to the industrial northeast of this country. But they don't come straight to Florida. They sweep across the Atlantic and mix with other winds from Europe and the steppes of Russia. They move down to the Mediterranean, and maybe farther, and then cross the Atlantic again.
By the time those winds drop their polluted contents on Florida's waters, who could say what plant, on what continent, is guilty?
"Most of the mercury we're getting here in Florida is coming from overseas, and there's not much we can do here in the state to stop it," said Dr. Bill Landing, an FSU oceanographer who joined a new, state-sanctioned research effort in 1991. Landing is an authority on low-level trace metals in the environment.
He's a leading member of the research team called Florida Atmospheric Research Study, which found that 900 pounds of rain-dissolved mercury falls on South Florida every year. And it falls mostly during the summer, when massive thunderstorms strip mercury and other contaminants out of air masses arriving every day from abroad.
Landing and his colleagues calculated that local sources couldn't have contributed more than 35 percent of the deadly mercury falling on south Florida - "and I'd say the real figure may be as low as 15 percent."
The research team includes scientists from Texas A&M University and Tetra Tech Inc., an environmental research company. The $3-million study was paid for by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, Florida Power & Light, the Electric Power Research Institute and the Florida Electric Power Coordinating Group.
Where does the study go now?
To Congress, among other places. No federal law can outlaw the trade winds, but maybe Washington can find a way to have another international conversation.
In any case, Landing did his part. He found the geographical magnitude of the problem.