by Dan Millott

The U.S. Navy has long had a presence in Key West, Florida. And the city, along with the rest of the Florida Keys, is indebted to the Navy for something most folks take for granted—good old H2O.

Residents of mainland Florida have always had access to fresh water, though in recent years there has been increasing concern about its long-term availability. But for years in the sparsely populated Keys, fresh water was gathered from the sky via rain cisterns. It was pure and refreshing, and, during the rainy season, the supply would be reliably replenished.

By the 1930s, leaders in the Keys began to look toward the future and felt they should consider a more reliable way of bringing fresh water to Monroe County. The first step to organize a water system for the Keys was instituted in 1937, when the Florida Legislature created the Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority (FKAA). The bill was pushed through by a thirty-five-year-old state representative named Bernie Papy, who would eventually become one Florida’s most powerful lawmakers and was dean of the Florida House of Representatives until 1962.

The FKAA was to be a vehicle to create a pipeline from the mainland. The pipeline would carry fresh water to the Keys and encourage development. It was a dream that would require funds, and the 1937 law didn’t provide money to build it.

But other things were brewing at the same time that helped make the dream a reality. During the 1930s, the clouds of war were building over Europe. By Labor Day of 1939, Great Britain and France had declared war on Germany after the latter’s invasion of Poland. In America, the nation was not yet involved, but elements of the U.S. Navy and Army were viewing events with concern.

As the Keys lusted for a funding source for their aqueduct, the Navy established a submarine base in Key West. Fresh water for the base was mandatory, so the federal government immediately set in motion construction of an eighteen-inch-diameter, 130-mile-long pipeline stretching from a well field near Florida City in Dade County to Key West. It went into service in 1942, right after America entered World War II.

Navy geologists determined that the Biscayne Aquifer, the mother lode for fresh water in Southeast Florida, was just sixty feet below the surface at the eventual site of the water plant for the Keys. According to Mike Tam, director of production and transmission at the FKAA Florida City water plant, the early pipeline utilized two large diesel engines once used on battleships to pump water from the well field into the pipeline. The flow was boosted along its journey by five diesel-powered pump stations dotting the island chain from Tavernier to Key West.

After the pipeline was opened, the Navy entered into an agreement with the FKAA to sell it water for civilian use in the Keys. In later years, the Navy opted to get out of the water business, turning over control of the water system to the authority.

In 1957, a bond issue backed by Papy would have funded the purchase of the Navy’s water system by Monroe County. It failed to pass. “The issue failed to pass because of the costs that would have been incurred,” says Tom Hambright, Monroe County’s historian. “It was not a rebuke of Papy.”

Tam, who has been with the FKAA since 1976, says the eighteen-inch pipeline was limited because it could provide just six million gallons of fresh water per day. In 1980, the agency secured a $60-million loan from the Federal Farmers Home Loan Bank to build a new pipeline. The new aqueduct was thirty-six inches wide from Florida City to Tavernier, thirty inches from Tavernier to Marathon, and twenty-four from Marathon to Key West. The new pipeline allowed the FKAA to eliminate two of the five pumping stations and increase capacity to its current maximum of seventeen to eighteen million gallons per day.

While Keys residents now had access to fresh water (other than from a rain barrel), there was always a tenuous aspect to the supply’s reliability. The pipeline was exposed in some spots, attached to bridges that spanned sections of the Overseas Highway. In September of 1960, when Hurricane Donna crossed the Keys at Islamorada, the storm tore out an Overseas Highway bridge. When the bridge went, the aqueduct water line went with it. Hurricanes often threaten the Keys, but the destruction of the water line served as a wake-up call.

Keys residents are surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, Gulf of Mexico, and Florida Bay, but it’s all salt water that’s not fit to drink. Unless they have the technology to convert sea water to fresh water.

Leaders of the FKAA began to look at some of the early desalination technologies, offshoots of systems used on ships to convert salt water to fresh. It was yet another idea borrowed from the Navy.

John Eckert, an FKAA engineer who worked on the first desalination plant, says the initial effort was a flash distillation system. It heated the salt water to 240 to 245 degrees. There were fifty stages in the evaporator that eventually would extract fresh water from the sea water. But the cost of the fuel needed made the system expensive to operate.

The Key West desalination plant was dedicated in 1967 with much fanfare. Vice President Hubert Humphrey came down for the dedication. It was America’s first desalination plant, and the ever-vibrant Humphrey bubbled with enthusiasm as the ribbon was cut.

High maintenance and fuel costs led to the demise of the flash distillation technology. The initial plant closed in 1980, and the FKAA moved to reverse-osmosis technology, which is used in most systems today.

Today, the agency uses a membrane technology to get fresh water from sea water. “The membrane squeezes the fresh water out of the salt water,” says FKAA executive director Jim Reynolds. “Pumps produce 1,200 to 1,300 pounds per square inch. They are able to recover about 30 percent fresh water from the salt water they run through the plant.”

Currently the FKAA operates two desalination plants, one at Key West’s Stock Island and a second at Marathon. The two can produce three million gallons of fresh water per day. Water produced by the two plants serves as a backup to the pipeline originating in Florida City.

After the desalinated water is incorporated into the Keys water system, the residue salt is returned to the channel near the Stock Island plant. Reynolds says the normal salt level in the water around Key West is 28,000 to 28,500 parts per million. The salt-water level after the residue is released rises to 31,000 parts per million in the immediate area of the discharge.

While the Florida City and desalinations plants now provide an ample fresh-water supply to the Keys, the FKAA has been facing some long-term problems of additional water availability. The South Florida Water Management District, reacting to rising fresh-water supply problems, is imposing limits on the volume of water to be drawn from the Biscayne Aquifer.

FKAA and other South Florida agencies charged with providing water began looking at desalination of brackish water. It’s possible to create twice as much fresh water from the same amount of energy by drawing from brackish sources.

In the early summer of 2007, the FKAA awarded a contract to construct a $39-million desalination plant at their Florida City site. Construction has already started and will be completed by 2009.

Tan says the plant will draw brackish water from the Floridian aquifer that lies 1,200 feet below the surface. The plant will be able to produce six million gallons per day. According to Ashie Akpoji, lead engineer for the South Florida Water Management District’s efforts in desalination projects, the new FKAA project will relieve intense pressure on water supplies incurred during drought periods.

So when folks in the Keys turn on the tap and get a drink, they have Reynolds and the other staff at the FKAA to thank for the fresh water coming out of the spout. “As executive director of the FKAA, I am very proud of how our team has risen to meet the unique challenges of providing potable water to paradise,” says Reynolds. “Our strategic plan is a roadmap to ensuring our future water supply in a sustainable, cost effective manner for generations to come.”

Dan Millott is a Miami-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in several Florida magazines. Many of his articles focus on Florida history, a subject he’s written about for more than forty years.