HIGH SPRINGS, FL (352today.com) – Robert “Bob” Knight did his doctoral research on Silver Springs in the 1970s. He came back to springs science in 2002, when the St. Johns River Water Management District hired him to study flow reductions and pollution at Blue Spring. What he saw there, he said, was a spring already in decline. State agencies then sent him across Florida. Every spring he measured, he said, was losing flow.
“I immediately saw that spring flows had declined a lot at that spring, and then I got hired to study springs all over the state by state agencies, and every one of the springs has got declining flows,” Knight said.
He does not treat that as a mystery. People, he said, are pumping three to four billion gallons a day from the Floridan aquifer on an average year, more in a dry year, when lawns and farms take extra. Average recharge, in his telling, is roughly 10 billion gallons a day. “We’re pumping more than a third of our average income,” he said. “It’s like having a bank account, and you got money coming in from some investment, and you start spending more than is coming in. What happens? Your account balance goes down.”…