Estero community battles polluted water

Water is a highly used source; people use it daily to drink, clean, bathe, and treat waste plants.

Recently, a neighbor who lives at the Cascades in Estero noticed something fishy in her pond and brought it to the attention of a professor at Florida Gulf Coast University.

“Someone who lives in the Cascades community contacted me about this concern about her ponds,” said James Douglass, a Marine Science Professor at FGCU. “She shared a report that a water quality testing company had given them on their ponds that showed really high levels of nutrients, and cyanobacteria and those were levels that were just kind of off the charts.”

Douglas considers these levels dangerously high. In the test shown, Douglass realized that the bacteria in the pond didn’t start there.

“The levels that we were seeing in this pond were so high that even that normal source of pollution seemed unlikely,” said Douglass. What emerged as the likely source of this pollution is wastewater sewage from a neighboring community where there’s an aging and failing sewage treatment plant that’s apparently leaking into this community,” said Douglas.