A Local ‘Inconvenient Truth’
“An Inconvenient Truth” was already taken as a title, but it also aptly describes a locally produced documentary about Tampa Bay. Titled “Tampa Bay: Living Legacy,” the one-hour film (airing on WUSF-16 and WEDU-3) captures the transformation of the Bay from a relatively unspoiled paradise in the 1950s to a polluted wasteland — and the efforts since to bring about its rebirth and recovery. Funded by the Tampa Bay Estuary Program and the Pinellas County Environmental Fund and produced by Public Media Productions, an award-winning local video company, the documentary should be required viewing for anyone who lives around the Bay.
Tampa Bay is in much better condition than it was a generation ago, but is still nowhere near as healthy as it was 50 years ago and is far from the paradise that once supported life in incredible abundance. The documentary recounts a time of which many local residents — two-third of whom have been here less than 25 years — are completely unaware. For example, until about 50 years ago, oysters were harvested from Tampa Bay in huge quantities and shipped worldwide with a reputation that today is associated only with Apalachicola Bay. The evidence of that abundance is still present from ancient times in shell mounds such as the Indian mound in Philippe Park, but the oysters didn’t just disappear. We ruined them. How? In a word, sewage.
Too many people generating too much waste during a period of uncontrolled and often unthinking growth resulted in damage to the Bay that will take still more decades to repair. The film, which is narrated by Tampa Bay’s own Broadway star, Patrick Wilson, and features interviews with key advocates for the Bay, is optimistic in its assessment of the changes that have occurred in the past 25 years. Certainly there has been remarkable progress in developing sewage treatment systems that have stopped the deliberate, direct dumping of raw waste in the Bay. But, just this summer human error at Clearwater’s local wastewater treatment plants — which also process all of Safety Harbor’s waste — resulted in a reported dumping of hundreds of thousands of gallons of raw sewage into Alligator Creek and Alligator Lake. A second incident at nearly the same time was largely unreported, but witnessed by Safety Harbor residents along Mullet Creek, who also saw raw waste contaminate that waterway.
Reviving the health of Tampa Bay is far from done. “Tampa Bay: Living Legacy” provides a useful education to anyone who is unaware of how amazing the estuary once was and how severely it has been damaged. It is not just a matter of stopping the dumping of raw sewage. Every development that contributes more stormwater runoff, every rain that sweeps more street trash into the Bay and every error at a wastewater plant contributes just a bit more damage. When Safety Harbor was a small, struggling town during the years of the Great Depression, many local families survived on mullet that literally were available for the taking from the Bay. Sport fish, including tarpon and redfish, also were plentiful. Shrimp and crabs were as common as the land bugs we now hire exterminators to chase from our houses. Tampa Bay’s health is our legacy. If this short film can provide inspiration as well as education, it will be of greater local importance than any summertime blockbuster.
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