Lee County to swap out methods of removing algae from Cape canals.

After pulling close to 300,000 gallons of blue-green algae slurry from local waters, Lee County will switch contractors and try a new approach to getting rid of the gunk that has polluted the water and caused breathing problems for growing numbers of people ashore.

For the past few weeks, the strategy has been to suck the algae off the water. A county contractor, AECOM,  has been doing the work, pulling 190,000 gallons of algae slurry out of 11 Cape Coral canals.

Assistant County Manager David Harner said another 100,000 gallons have been trucked to a treatment plant for processing.

The grant that had been paying the contractor will all be spent soon, and the state agency overseeing the  program wants to see some innovation attacking the problem.

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Gov. Rick Scott has authorized $9 million for  the Department of Environmental Protection to parcel out to five counties, including Lee, that have been hardest hit by the water infestation.

The funds are being spent in Lee, Collier, Martin, Manatee and Sarasota counties. The grants have been split between red tide, which has been funded for $6 million and the blue-green algae, which is the target of the remainder of the funding.  

For an upcoming funding round, the DEP is interested in demonstration projects that can test other ways of handling the algae clean-up.

Lee County will try to snare as much of that money as it can by shifting to a contractor who treats the water with ozone, killing the algae in the water, rather than removing it and taking it to be treated.

"I think DEP's goal is to look at a number of options to see if there is a viable one that is going to work," Harner said. "AECOM is removing the algae, but it is still in the water column."  

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County staffers will work up a plan for using the ozone technology as a demonstration project. A proposed contract is being developed to spell out how the job would work.

The contractor,  Stuart-based Ecosphere Technologies, uses a system that circulates water through an ozone treatment process and returns it to the water body.

"If it meets the standards of DEP they would consider the proposal, they would consider a process that meets their standard," Harner said.

Red tide cleanup has concentrated on the piles of dead fish and other marine life that has been washing ashore. 

Crowder Gulf Joint Venture, the county's agricultural waste hauler, reports that  Captiva and Sanibel islands have seen the most dead marine life washing up on beaches. 

From Aug. 22-27, 48 tons of dead marine life washed up on Captiva have been removed. In total, 2,100 tons of marine debris have been removed from the county shoreline.  

The county is nurturing an expectation that what nature has wrought, nature will remove.

"We are hoping that with this easterly wind, it is pushing the debris out into the Gulf,"  Harner said. "We hope to go up into the air this week and confirm that."

Meanwhile, county commissioners have approved another extension of the states of emergency for the twin villains of the water crisis. The blue-green algae state of emergency is now on its fifth extension, the red tide state of emergency on its fourth. 

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