ENVIRONMENT

To help plan for Black Creek pipeline, agency OK's pilot project to make dark water clear

Florida Times-Union

The "Save Our Lakes" message inn the 2017 photo was hung on the side of one of the docks on Lake Brooklyn in Keystone Heights, where falling water levels separated homes from the lakefront that once defined the area. A pipeline carrying water from Black Creek is expected to help lake water levels, but is meant primarily to help recharge the aquifer.

The St. Johns River Water Management District’s governing board approved a water-clarifying project Tuesday that needs to succeed before a pipeline can be built to deliver water from Clay County’s Black Creek to Keystone Heights.

The $1.2 million pilot project is designed to test how well a man-made wetland can filter out natural dark staining before the creek’s water is pumped 17 miles to reach another creek that feeds naturally clear, but shrunken, Lake Brooklyn.

“When you look at this, I think this is where the benchmark stands today,” board Chairman Douglas Burnett said of the wetland, patterned after one built last year to absorb phosphorus from water at a Fleming Island sewage treatment plant.

A state agency plans to pump water from Clay County's Black Creek, shown in this 2018 photo from near the Florida 16 bridge, to an aquifer recharge area near Alligator Creek in Keystone Heights, where the flow is expected to also feed parched lakes. Because the creek is darker than the lakes, St. Johns River Water Management District staff want to first test how well the water's color can be lightened using a man-made wetland that would be built at a county-run animal control center hear the creek.

The pipeline was originally planned without the filtering wetland, but federal officials worried the dark creek water could change the ecology of Lake Brooklyn.

The pilot will handle a few thousand gallons of water per day on land off Florida 16 near Black Creek close to Green Cove Springs.

If it’s successful, district officials plan to harvest up to 10 million gallons a day near that spot and pump it to an aquifer recharge area near the southern end of Camp Blanding. Some of the piped water is expected to flow into Alligator Creek, which feeds Lake Brooklyn, where docks and lakefront homes have been cut off from the water as the lake has retreated.

The agency's board could be asked by late summer to approve funding — about $15 million — for a full-size wetland at Keystone Heights.