Earlier this month team members installed a monitoring station by the Hollywood Sewage Outfall.
The outfall which discharges 47.5 million gallons of treated wastewater a day is located about 3050 m offshore from Hollywood, Florida. The discharge is pumped via a huge pipe with a port diameter of 1.52 m into the ocean at a depth of about 28.5 m.
The sewage outfalls into the ocean have been scheduled for close down by the year 2025 although there are certain lawmakers trying to amend this by allowing up to 5% to be discharged in peak flow events such as from floods in connection with hurricanes.
The station that Project Baseline Gulfstream has set up is similar to the many stations that we have set up at the Osborne Reef.
As with all the Project Baseline stations the idea is to visit these with as regular interval as possible to observe and log a status quo which over time can be put together to aid in reliable evaluation of any changes of condition that might occur.
The station at the Hollywood Outfall is located slightly to the South West outfall pipe right by the natural reef. As always Project Baseline Gulfstream invites anybody who might be visiting this location on their dives to share any observations, images, videos and logs so that the database that we are compiling and building will be even more useful for all, scientists, policymakers, yourself and us.
This Sunday, a team of Project Baseline Gulfstream visited the station and captured several still images and quite a bit of video footage. Here are some of the images that were captured (for larger view, just click the individual image):
Photo Credits – All Rights Reserved – Mikkel Pitzner
To see more images, please visit the Hollywood Sewage Outfall Project page. More images and videos to follow in future post.