A thick layer of brown muck squished under Bill Hawthorne’s sandal as he walked a chest of water monitoring equipment to a rocky dry spot of Poe Springs Park.
The sensation didn’t bother Hawthorne, an environmental scientist with the Florida Springs Institute used to the discomfort of field work. But something about the spring put a lump in his throat as his eyes scanned over stagnant, algae-lined water.
“It almost feels like a pet dying,” Hawthorne said. “There's not many places in the world that are like this, and right now it's green, it smells weird, and I can't even go swimming in it.”
A 1928 survey commissioned by the Florida Legislature highlighted Poe in its list of “springs and wells with curative values or notable for purity.”
But, nearly a century later, the muck-bottomed bowl needs curing itself.
The gushing groundwater that fills crystalline swimming holes in North Central Florida temporarily stopped flowing at nine springs this year. Scientists call the mucky, green pools that ensued evidence that human activity is making the state’s largest source of drinking water more vulnerable to droughts and other disasters.
Hawthorne, optimistically, expects rain to restore Poe’s flow to its pre-drought level. But that level is about a third of the spring’s historical flow, according to data from the Florida Springs Institute, U.S. Geological Survey and Suwannee River Water Management District, despite state plans in place to protect the springs.
Springs are “a canary in the coal mine,” Hawthorne said, gesturing to the spring’s green waters. “This is a very clear visual that we are harming our aquifer.”
‘A billion people in a puddle of water’
Alachua County staff deemed Poe Spring’s stagnant waters unsafe for swimming in mid-July and blocked the spring’s entrance with a chainlink gate.
The park was on track to break its summer revenue record before the closure, county tourism staff report. Now, it’s about $12,000 short of last summer and the gap is growing.
Parkgoers can still pay the $6 admission fee to picnic or play, said county parks director Jason Maurer, but “the main point of everybody wanting to come this time of year is to swim in the springs.” He doesn’t anticipate swimming will reopen before the end of September, when Alachua County stops charging for parking.
Gainesville resident Dahlia Welch is one of the 2,000-or-so swimmers forced to search for a different swimming hole.
Welch squeezed in three visits before the gate closed this summer. By her third, in June, waning water levels shrunk the swimming area and exposed the rocky spring run.
“It felt like a billion people in a puddle of water,” she said.
Welch couldn’t go to neighboring Gilchrist Blue Springs, a state park, because it closed to swimmers for renovations. Privately-owned Ginnie Springs was too boisterous for her taste.
“ I just went to the beach instead,” she said.
Requests for reductions
The 1,000-plus freshwater springs that bubble up in Florida are some of the state’s oldest tourist attractions. Travelers stepped off of steamboats and onto glass-bottomed vessels in Silver Springs in the 1870s. The mermaids of Weeki Wachee Spring debuted their underwater ballets in 1947.
But while these long-running destinations continue to draw new generations of visitors, one of their contemporaries, White Springs, stands swallowed by the past.
A four-story bath house perches at a bend of the Suwannee River, about 15 miles east of Live Oak. The allegedly “curative” water drew hordes of visitors throughout the 19th and 20th centuries until it began to recede.
The spring stopped flowing for the first time in 1977. Between the 1950s and 90s, groundwater in the underlying aquifer fell about six feet, according to estimates from the Suwannee River Water Management District. Without enough pressure to push water out, the spring effectively disappeared.
“White Springs was a giant tourist destination and now it’s totally dead,” Hawthorne said. “How many springs have we already ruined? We're in the middle of it right now.”
The St. Johns and Suwannee River Water Management Districts, brokers of the region’s groundwater, declared shortages earlier this year that remain in effect. Those declarations, spurred by the worst drought to strike the region in over a decade, spell out restrictions for using water on lawns, golf courses, phosphate mines, farm fields, cemeteries and other lands throughout North Central Florida.
University of South Florida hydrology professor Patricia Spellman said drought compounds existing human pressures on the springs.
“ These droughts are having more of a consequential impact because –I want to be careful with my words– but probably because [groundwater] pumping has been going on and causing some alterations to the Florida aquifer system,” she said.
The Florida Department of Environmental Protection didn’t respond to previous allegations raised by advocacy groups that these alterations amounted to “harm”, but wrote the agency and the state’s water management districts, “work to protect water resources, including Outstanding Florida Springs, through comprehensive regulatory frameworks, including permitting, minimum flows and levels, and water shortage orders.”
In late August, Alachua County asked the Suwannee and St. Johns Water Management Districts to cut all permitted water withdrawals by 20%.
They refused.
“The District does not apply uniform reductions across all permitted uses,” wrote Michael Register, executive director for the St. Johns district. “Instead, restrictions are developed through a rule-based process that considers the nature of the water use, available conservation opportunities, potential impacts to public health and safety, environmental conditions, and broader public interest considerations.”
In the Suwannee District, some commercial and industrial users have reduced their water use by more than 20%, reported spokesperson Troy Roberts. “Public supply water use, however, is down only slightly,” he wrote.
Public supply refers to the water pumped out by utilities that makes its way to water fountains, fire hydrants, household taps and other uses in homes, businesses and industries that don’t have their own wells.
It’s the main use of water in the St. Johns District, but represented just 6% of daily groundwater use in the Suwannee district in 2023, the most recent year for which data are available. Agricultural and industrial uses in the Suwannee District represented 64% and 22%, respectively, over the same period.
Allocating a finite resource
Back at Poe Spring, Hawthorne’s flow meter beeped as it registered “a tiny little trickle” of water coming out of the spring, an improvement from his observations earlier in the summer.
“Flow is incredibly important for springs,” he said, kicking up an underwater cloud of muck with his feet. “When you lose it, you get a lot of this detritus buildup. If there was high flow, it would wash it all out.”
Dying plants and fish poop cover the soil, making it harder for plants to root. Hot, stagnant water promotes algae blooms that shade out native plants.
“When it returns to normal flow conditions and we look at vegetation and wildlife in here, it's likely to be worse than it was before,” Hawthorne said. “And to be honest, the spring wasn't great to begin with, or at least in my time surveying it.”
In 2015, the state declared Poe’s flow, and that of the Lower Santa Fe and Ichetucknee Rivers, to be below what it considered permissible, triggering plans for “recovery” projects to restore water levels by 2045.
In a 2024 study, the Suwannee and St. Johns Districts determined they shared the blame for the decline, each accounting for around 35% to 45% of the change. The Districts and their partners evaluated more than 800 potential regional solutions.
They settled on four.
The largest, by far, was Water First North Florida: a $1.1 billion project to pump up to 40 million gallons per day of reclaimed water from Jacksonville into treatment wetlands in North Central Florida. Rural leaders publicly opposed the project and lawmakers slashed potential state funds earlier this year, but a tentative budget from the St. Johns District, published on Aug. 1, includes $10 million for “ongoing and future efforts to facilitate recharge in northeast Florida.”
Other projects included pumping already underway to collect water from the South Fork of Black Creek in Clay County, treat it at Camp Blanding and discharge it into Alligator Creek; irrigation improvements for agriculture; and a residential certification program to reduce water use in new homes.
But projects that promise to boost springflow in 20 years are little comfort to Hawthorne, now, back at Poe Spring.
“Right now what we're doing is not sustainable,” he said. “We’re seeing these negative effects to our aquifer in our springs.”
