Abstract
Healthcare demand for liquid oxygen during the COVID-19 pandemic limited the availability of oxygen needed for ozone disinfection of drinking water in several urban areas of Florida. While the situation reduced the state’s capacity to provide normal drinking water treatment for millions of people, calls for water conservation during the emergency period resulted in virtually no change in water consumption. Here, we point out that 38–40% of the potable water produced by one of the major utilities in Florida is not used for drinking water but instead is used for outdoor landscape irrigation. This suggests that emergency-level calls for reduced water use could have been made if outdoor irrigation was limited, but we present data showing that there was little change in public behavior, and the state was unable to meet necessary water use reductions during the emergency. This inability to meet short-term emergency water conservation needs foretells a long-term lack of resilience against other global change scenarios and suggests that much work is still needed to build resilience into Florida’s water future. We conclude this Viewpoint paper by calling for more urgent sociohydrological research to understand the coupled human-natural drivers of how water supplies respond to global change.
Highlights
Florida, a peninsular state with a subtropical climate, is surrounded by water and receives almost 140 cm of rainfall each year
Regional water supply planners estimate that the state will need an additional 849 million gallons per day (MGD) of potable water to keep up with population growth through 2040 [2]
The liquid oxygen used to make ozone for disinfection at various drinking water treatment plants was scarce because priority was given to COVID-19 patients needing the same oxygen supply
Summary
A peninsular state with a subtropical climate, is surrounded by water and receives almost 140 cm of rainfall each year. As high demand from healthcare systems for liquid oxygen peaked in August and September 2021, Florida utilities that rely on ozone disinfection experienced a 30–50% reduction in oxygen supply shipments [3] This led to reduced capacity to meet normal drinking water treatment and disinfection standards for millions of Floridians. In August 2021, the mayor of Orlando, Florida (the state’s fourth most populous city) joined with a representative from the Orlando Utilities Commission to announce that they would need to reduce water demand by 25–50% in the coming weeks They explained that liquid oxygen used in the drinking water treatment process was being diverted to area hospitals for critically ill COVID-19 patients [4] and made a call for citizens to cut down on all non-essential water consumption. The purpose of presenting this narrative is to highlight how the current pandemic exposed the fragility of our public water supply and the need to more effectively build resilience for an uncertain future in the face of population growth and climate change
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