As Polk County's population grows, so does the demand for clean drinking water, and an innovative pilot project in Lakeland may be a solution to that problem.
Following retirement, my wife Joanne and I traveled the country in an RV from Idaho down to Arizona, through Texas and over to Florida. During this adventure, we got to experience the major variations in water availability and storage across the country. In the east, we saw the abundance of fresh water and shallow depth to available groundwater, and in the west, we saw the depletion of Lake Mead and the increasing depth to groundwater supplies as growth and overuse explodes.
R.B. Provencher
In Florida, Joanne and I took the opportunity to tour the Cape Coral brackish water desalination facility. In Florida, not too far below the surface, there are large quantities of brackish water, which is a mixture of fresh and seawater. Desalination of brackish water is not as much of a heavy lift as for seawater since the salt concentrations are much lower. It was great to see a community like Cape Coral not just planning ways to better manage its freshwater supplies, but actually implementing