ENVIRONMENT

Water agency inks contract to start building pipeline from Black Creek to Keystone Heights

Florida Times-Union

Black Creek near the Florida 16 bridge in Clay County is the area where the St. Johns River Water Management District wants to collect excess water to pipe to Keystone Heights. This photo was taken in 2018 by St. Johns Riverkeeper Lisa Rinaman.

Workers could start building a 17-mile pipeline linking Clay County’s Black Creek to Keystone Heights by February, said officials for a water agency that awarded a $41.3 million construction contract Tuesday.

The St. Johns River Water Management District’s governing board approved the contract with Palm Beach County-based DBE Management LLC for the second phase of a three-part project to move creek water to an aquifer recharge area where lakes receded for years.

The agency approved a $15.9 million contract in July for a different company to build the first phase, a pump station to draw as much as 10 million gallons daily from the creek into the ductile iron pipeline DBE will install along a route that will follow Florida 16 and Florida 21.

Brooklyn Bay in Keystone Heights stopped far short of docks in this photo from 2005. Neighbors who organized the Save Our Lakes Organization have campaigned for years for steps to raise water levels in the the shrunker lakes around Keystone Heights and have asked an administrative law judge for permission to intervene in a legal fight over a plan to pump water to the lakes from Clay County's Black Creek.

The management district is still designing the project’s third phase, a “passive treatment system” to lighten the color of the tannin-stained creek water before it enters the Keystone area’s naturally clear lakes Brooklyn and Geneva.

The project’s three parts are scheduled to be completed and operating together by September 2024, Dale Jenkins, the management district’s director of projects, told the governing board.

Moving creek water to the recharge area is supposed to replenish an aquifer that’s Northeast Florida’s source of drinking water while also raising Keystone’s depressed lake levels as much as 10 feet.

The effort, called the Black Creek Water Resources Development Project, has received $112.6 million in cash and commitments since 2017 from the Florida Legislature, the water agency and Northeast Florida utilities. The final cost may be a good bit less, however.

The Black Creek Water Resource Development Project in southwest Clay County involves moving water from Black Creek to a recharge area near Keystone Heights to feed the Floridan aquifer.

The pipeline contract was estimated early this year to potentially cost $60 million, Jenkins told the governing board. He said the number was high partly because prices for iron were high early in the war between Russia and Ukraine, both important pig iron producers.

He said the 30-inch pipeline will be lined inside with cement so the water won’t affect the iron piping, and testing with a treatment system like the one planned around Keystone shows Black Creek water can be lightened reliably.

“The water that gets into Brooklyn and Geneva will be a better quality that won’t affect the [lakes’] color,” Jenkins said.

Following years of studies and permitting delays, board members expressed enthusiasm about seeing the pipeline take shape.

“I think we’ll have something that everybody will be excited about,” member Douglas Burnett said.