Mounting pressure is on to replace Fiveash, the very same 1950s-era water plant the mayor once described as being held together by spit and chewing gum.
Fort Lauderdale officials are on the verge of making a deal with a private company to build a new water plant that will cost $666 million and have the capacity towithstand a Category 5 hurricane. The new plant would also get rid of the yellow tinge in the drinking water produced by Fiveash, Fort Lauderdale’s main water treatment plant.
“We really need to get going on this water plant,” Mayor Dean Trantalis said during a recent meeting at City Hall. “We cannot afford to wait any longer. At some point, we need to pull the trigger.”
Commissioners plan to vote on the deal Tuesday.
The new plant has a $666 million price tag but will end up costing $1.4 billion over the course of a 30-year loan. To help pay for the plant, more than 250,000 water customers in Fort Lauderdale and beyond will see their rates go up by more than 140% in 10 years. For the average water customer, the monthly bill would jump from $31 to $75.
But critics think Fiveash can be saved and say all that money might be better spent on replacing the city’s vintage water pipes.
“Fiveash is old, neglected and abused — but it’s not dead,” California-based water quality expert Bob Bowcock said during a recent meeting of the city’s Infrastructure Task Force. “It can be rebuilt. It can provide superior water quality. A $666 million new treatment plant is not the answer. If you’ve got $666 million to spend on this, put it in your pipes. Because that’s what you’re going to ruin next. They’re already fragile.”
Crystal clear H 2O
Bowcock put it in simple terms: “If you go out and replace this heart with a brand new heart and you have a body that’s equally run down, you’re going to blow out all the veins.”
Bowcock also predicts the water won’t be so crystal clear once it goes through the city’s old, rusty pipes.
“Your consumers are going to expect pure water coming out of their tap,” he said. “What you’re going to get is pure water running through old pipes and they’re going to get nasty, stinky, brown water after spending $666 million. They are not going to be happy.”
But city officials and their expert consultants say Fiveash isn’t worth saving.
If commissioners say yes to the deal on Tuesday, IDE Technologies has agreed to design and build the new plant by October 2026, within 42 months. IDE would also manage and maintain the plant for 30 years. Financing would be provided by Ridgewood.
Fiveash, located west of Interstate 95 between Commercial and Oakland boulevards, provides water to Fort Lauderdale and Port Everglades along with all or parts of Wilton Manors, Oakland Park, Tamarac, Davie, Lauderdale-by-the-Sea and tiny Sea Ranch Lakes.
The new plant would be built 4 miles to the west, next to Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport, and will use nanofiltration and ion exchange technology as recommended by one of the city’s consultants in 2019.
Fiveash has notbeen able to meet the city’s goal of delivering crystal-clear water to homes, hotels and businesses. Experts say that’s because the plant’s lime-softening treatment system can’t remove tannins — organic material that gives the water its yellow color — from the underground water supply.
Retrofitting Fiveash will not do the trick, city-hired consultants say. The new plant, however, will use technology that makes all that yellow water a thing of the past, they say.
‘Looking for trouble’
Bowcock, chief environmental investigator for the non-profit run by high-profile environmental activist Erin Brockovich, said Fort Lauderdale’s water plant will be like a shiny new Cadillac. But he warned that the new treatment system it will use could further weaken Fort Lauderdale’s fragile pipes similar to what happened in Flint, Michigan.
“It’s like doing a heart transplant on somebody with bad veins,” Bowcock told the South Florida Sun Sentinel. You’re looking for trouble.”
The Flint water crisis made headlines in 2015 after an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease killed at least 12 people and sickened dozens more. Months before, Flint changed its water source and failed to apply corrosion inhibitors to the water. Lead from aging pipes leached into the water supply, exposing tens of thousands of residents to dangerous levels of lead.
Legionalla bacteria live in the biofilm, a collection of organic and inorganic material inside the water pipes. When Flint changed its water system, the highly corrosive water alsoreleased the Legionalla bacteria into the water supply.
“Changing the water quality now will have a significant, dangerous impact on your water system’s infrastructure and water quality,” Bowcock said. “Fort Lauderdale is a Flint, Michigan waiting to happen.”
Dr. William Becker, a nationally respected water supply and treatment expert and vice president at the city-hired consultant Hazen and Sawyer, dismissed those concerns.
“Flint Michigan was, at its core, a case of neglect and deferred investment,” Becker said in an email to the Sun Sentinel. “The city of Fort Lauderdale is planning a large investment in advanced, modern technology. If the city implements the planned technology, I do not see a parallel with Flint.”
City officials are well aware there might be water quality challenges that could occur if the water entering the network of underground pipes is suddenly changed without proper stabilization, Becker said via email.
To address that potential problem, the city will order a study to determine optimum corrosion control treatment and stabilization of the finished water from the new plant — common practice when converting old lime softening technology to advanced membrane treatment, Becker said.
The city will pay for the study and any work required to provide for corrosion control treatment, Public Works Director Alan Dodd said. At this time, city officials do not know the cost of either, Dodd said.
Sense of urgency
Trantalis, who was not at the task force meeting, also dismissed critics’ concerns.
When told that Bowcock was warning that Fort Lauderdale could turn into a Flint, Michigan, Trantalis said that would be true only if Fort Lauderdale did not build a new plant.
“We can say ‘what if’ all day long,” he said. “The only relation we have to Flint, Michigan is if we don’t move quickly.”
Fort Lauderdale has a plan to replace its aging network of underground pipes but that will take several years.
“We can’t replace those overnight,” Trantalis said.
Trantalis says the long-neglected pipes only prove the need to move forward on a new water treatment plant with a sense of urgency.
“This city has suffered too much from neglect of its infrastructure,” he said. “When are we going to learn that lesson?”
In 2019, Trantalis described Fiveash as being held together by spit and chewing gum.
“We have engaged in patchwork undertakings to hold it together,” he said.
The mayor says he took a tour of Fiveash in 2017, after a report by Reiss Engineering of Winter Springs warned Fiveash was on the verge of calamitous failure.
“You can’t get a message that’s any more foreboding than that,” he said.
But Ralph Zeltman, a retired engineer and member of the infrastructure task force, still has reservations about building a new plant.
Zeltman says he visited Fiveash four years ago and again on Tuesday.
“You hear the mayor say it wouldn’t withstand a major hurricane,” he said. “That water plant is probably better built than some modern ones. It has a lot of steel and cinderblock and concrete. It’s like a fortress.”
Gone forever
He’s also not sold on the proposed treatment process for the new plant, mainly because it will waste water.
An estimated 15% of the water processed will be sent 3,000 feet below the earth’s surface into a deep injection well, gone forever.
“There are other less expensive treatment processes that should be considered,” Zeltman said. “With the nanofiltration system, they’ll have 15 percent of water they can’t use. They’re going to discharge the water 3,000 feet down to the boulder zone and it eventually goes out into the ocean.”
Boyd Corbin, a water activist from Wilton Manors, has made countless trips to Fort Lauderdale City Hall to urge the mayor and commission to invest $170 million in rehabbing Fiveash and forget the idea of building a new plant.
“They are set on bulldozing Fiveash,” Corbin told the Sun Sentinel. “We are building the plant 4 miles away from the distribution pipes, close to the executive airport where it will be in the flight path. It’s the stupidest idea ever. We could use the money to fix our pipes. They’re saying it [the new technology] won’t fit at Fiveash, but it will. And even with this new filter they’re still going to be adding ammonia to our drinking water. And that greatly weakens the disinfecting power of chlorine.”
Fred Bloetscher, a civil engineering professor at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, visited Fiveash 15 years ago, so couldn’t say whether it can be saved.
“I don’t know how far gone it is,” he said. “You have water plants that are 100 years old. The question is how well you maintain it. You have to invest money in the building. You build a new plant when the technology no longer works or the facility can no longer be repaired or you can’t get the right water quality.”
As for Bowcock’s Flint comparison, “it’s a bit of a stretch,” Bloetscher said.
“A lot of people were indicted for not doing their jobs up there,” he said. “They sent water into the system that was highly corrosive and it dissolved the pipes. And they had a lot of lead pipes. Then, when they realized they had that problem, they backed off the chlorine. And that’s why they had so many Legionnaires’ cases. You need that chlorine to disinfect the water. They sent unstable water into the system that was highly corrosive. And the rest is history.”
Susannah Bryan can be reached at or on Twitter @Susannah_Bryan
