Tiny bubbles part of new strategy to strangle Lee County's blue-green algae problem
Bill Smith
A company that manages private lakes throughout Florida is the next contractor that will try to show how it can get rid of blue-green algae that has made thousands of Lee County residents miserable.
SOLitude Lake Management, which has offices throughout the country including one in Fort Myers, tends to the ecological balance in bodies of water in Florida.
Lee County has agreed to allow the company to perform demonstration projects at locations badly affected by the blue-green algae in North Fort Myers. If it works, the experiment could broaden to Cape Coral.
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The county first decided to use funds from the latest Florida Department of Environmental Protection grant to hire a Stuart-based company to perform a demonstration project. But that company had financial problems, including multiple lawsuits over failure to pay for some of its equipment.
The plug was pulled and DEP told the county it could retargeted some of the $750,000 grant to algae removal and cleaning up marine life killed by red tide along the shore.
AECom, which was sucking algae out of canals in Cape Coral and carting it off for processing, would continue its work in Cape Coral, Assistant County Manager David Harner said.
AECom began redeploying its equipment Monday and was to start collecting algae in Cape Coral again on Tuesday.
"We also received authorization from DEP for a free demonstration project," Harner said. "It is a nano-bubble technology and will begin on the 24th of this month, we will be putting that into North Fort Myers."
That demonstration will be guided by SOLitude director of Florida lake management, Bill Kurth.
A 30-year resident of Cape Coral, Kurth has worked for decades on maintaining bodies of water in Southwest Florida. He said the company is volunteering the time and equipment to show it can work.
"We wouldn't offer to do this for free if we weren't confident we are able to make a big impact," Kurth said. "Otherwise we would be wasting our time."
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Several weeks ago, SOLitude brought in another firm that specialized in nano-bubble technology, which uses extremely small cleansing bubbles, to clean a lake at the Lexington County Club in south Fort Myers. That algae has returned near the shore of the lake. Kurth said that demonstration was for a half-acre of a "much larger" lake, so the lake was never completely disinfected, so the algae had the opportunity to grow once again.
The south Fort Myers algae extinction effort used a small unit, a bit larger than a big refrigerator, brought in on a small trailer. The unit used a pump to create the tiny nano-bubbles and in fuse them into the water.
The extremely thin bubble wall would burst under the pressure of a few feet of water and discharge a payload of oxygen and ozone into the water to kill the algae and make sure that the water was oxygenated enough for beneficial plants and marine life.
In the demonstrations authorized for North Fort Myers, a much larger pump will be used, one that can circulate 3,600 gallons of water per minute. Rather than injecting tiny bubbles into the water, the larger system draws water out, treats it, and immediately pumps it back into the body of water, a few feet below the surface so that the ozone is not lost in the atmosphere.
Equipment that will be moved to Lee County for the work is now in Texas, where it was used to clean water from petroleum fracking operations.
"This system is going to be very rapid because of the sheer volume of it," Kurth said. "We know the equipment will have a vivid impact on algae."
Nano-bubble technology has received a significant dose of attention in recent years, since it was used to successfully control an algae problem in North Carolina in an exercise that drew the attention of federal authorities.
If the tiny bubble formula works in the northern Lee County experiments, additional equipment could be moved in. If it works really well, it may be used on multiple sites in a single day.
"Because of the volume, because these things are massive, we may be able to clean up a canal in a matter hours,and then move on to another one," Kurth said. "If the county wants to talk to us about doing multiple sites, we'll be ready to do it."
There have been no negotiations beyond the initial demonstration between Lee County and SOLitude.
The red tide issue took something of a turn for the worse last weekend due to prevailing wind directions. Some of the latest round of DEP grant money will now be used as needed to collect marine debris killed by the latest bacterial infestation.
"We were hit again this weekend, and we have worked closely with Sanibel and are collecting dead fish in Boca, Sanibel and Captiva," Harner said.
Commissioners approved agreements with the city of Sanibel and town of Fort Myers Beach to fund red tide clean-up operations in the two incorporated coastal communities. The agreements will allow the communities to receive a portion of $1.9 million that DEP had targeted for the red tide cleanup.
The county will receive $3.9 million in DEP grants that have been allocated for red tide and blue-green algae, or 46 percent of the total allocated to five Southwest Florida counties.
