17 May After 25 years, Story Farm president Bob Morris is back in the Orlando Sentinel

Florida’s Waters Are Killing People – I Was Almost One of Them

By: Bob Morris (originally appeared in Orlando Sentinel on May, 17, 2019)

(Richard Graulich / AP)

My wife and I were paddle-boarding in a mangrove cove near the mouth of the Caloosahatchee River, a few miles east of Sanibel Island, when I spotted the slightly submerged oyster bed just a few yards ahead.

I braced, but the collision was hard and sent me soaring. Not the first time I’d been catapulted while paddle-boarding — ah, the joys of Florida’s shoal waters — but in this instance I crash-landed on mud-encrusted shells that sliced and diced me from one end to the other, a particularly gnarly gash in my left knee.

We paddled back to where we were staying, a crimson puddle staining the deck of my board. I spent the rest of the afternoon and into the night tending the wound on my knee. I’d suffered worse gashes and knew the drill: wash the cut, force it to bleed, flush with hydrogen peroxide, apply antiseptic. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Next morning my leg was swollen up the size of a Sumter County watermelon, skin turning a purply red. Hurt like hell to walk. My wife drove us back home and straight to our family doctor. I was expecting maybe a round of antibiotics. Instead, I was sent directly to the ER at Winter Park Hospital. Within an hour, doctors placed me on amputation watch.

Thanks to the benevolence of morphine, I hazily observed the biology project taking place on an appendage I had grown pretty fond of over 66 years. IV tubes going every which way, endless blood work, countless shots, including a series of injections directly into my gut. That red-purply skin edged to black. All in less than 24 hours.

By the next morning I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to die. After a couple of days, the doctors cautiously advised that I probably would not lose my leg. Still, it took a week in the hospital before they identified the microscopic monsters that caused the damage — vibrio vulnificus. Often called a “flesh-eating bacteria,” it’s something you can contract from an open wound in the water or occasionally from eating oysters. Friends and family joked that I had slurped down so many of them over the years that the bivalves were exacting their revenge. I was joking along with them until I went online from my hospital bed and looked up stats from the Florida Department of Health. During the previous year 45 people had contracted vibrio vulnificus and 14 had died.

Har-dee-har-har.

This happened almost three years ago, July 2016. It was during one of those blue-green algae blooms in Lake Okeechobee that prompts the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to dump water into the Caloosahatchee and the Gulf of Mexico. To the east it flows out the St. Lucie River to the Atlantic. Maybe you recall seeing stories and dramatic video from both coasts. It could have been a bad movie — “Invasion of the Green Slime Monsters.”

The blooms have been getting worse, dovetailing with an epic red tide along the Gulf in 2018. And they are spreading, with recent reports of algae blooms near the source of the St. Johns River in Brevard County and 120 miles upriver in Lake George.

Algae blooms, red tide, vibrio vulnificus — all are natural occurrences in Florida waters, especially in warm weather. While there’s ongoing research into exactly how they are connected, it’s pretty clear that global warming triggers the frequency and robustness of these bad actors. Climate change equals warmer water equals more of the bad stuff. Easy math.

There’s also solid evidence showing that algae blooms produce a neurotoxin that has been linked to everything from Alzheimer’s disease and auto-immune deficiencies to Lou Gehrig’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. Further research hints that these neurotoxins can be ingested by eating seafood from infested waters or simply by breathing the foul air.

The most recent tally from the Florida Department of Health, from 2006 to 2018: 349 people have contracted vibrio vulnificus and 99 have died. This does not include, from just the last month, the Ohio man who cut his foot while kayaking near Tampa Bay and the Pinellas County fisherman who gouged his hand on a hook. Both spent a long time in the hospital. Both are doing OK, no limbs lost.

The blame is on all of us who live on this sandy spit of land. Whether you play golf on a course that needs perfect green grass, raise cattle, grow corn or sugar cane or ornamental plants, fertilize your lawn, flush a toilet — we human beings are the problem.

We can take small and cautious encouragement from Gov. Rick DeSantis’ appointment last month of five members to our state’s Blue-Green Algae Task Force. They are a brain trust of marine scientists, biologists and environmental engineers from top universities and research centers. Agricultural interests will doubtless attempt to dismiss their findings, just as many in the tourism industry will prefer that everything be kept hush-hush.

Actually, the groundwork is already being laid for the latter. On May 7, in Fort Myers, U.S. Rep. Francis Rooney (R-Naples) called a meeting of select public officials and researchers to discuss the algae issue…and then closed doors to the public, including the media. Defenders said they didn’t want things to “get blown out of proportion.”

Sorry, but proportion has long since bolted from the burning barn (repeat: 99 dead) and what’s getting blown out is Florida.

We should be further outraged by the criminal complacency from state leaders that brought us to this point. The Blue-Green Algae Task was created in 1999 and lauded for showing that Florida was truly concerned about its environment. But in one of those sick ironies that can only come out of Tallahassee, no members were ever appointed to the task force and it was defunded in 2001.

When he was governor, U. S. Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) had the opportunity to appropriate money and put some bodies into those empty task force chairs. Didn’t happen. But then, this is the same Rick Scott who let it be known that the words “climate change” and “global warming” had no place in state documents.

What it gets down to is this: Florida’s waters are killing people. I was almost one of them.

For those fools who dispute it, who turn their heads and think it will go away, who deny the imminent peril of global warming, who think we can just keep dumping stuff into our lakes and rivers, well, I know an oyster bed where they can take a walk.

Barefoot.