How Municipalities Support Cleaner Water on the Coast

Clean water makes our lives better. It keeps families healthy, supports thriving ecosystems, and sparks economic growth. Even so, water sources are threatened every day. Aging infrastructure, natural disasters, and population growth can negatively impact water quality. In coastal areas, groundwater pumping and wastewater systems deliver new contaminants to water sources every day.  

Fortunately, there’s a lot we can do to improve water quality.  

Infrastructure improvements, long-term planning, and quality monitoring go a long way in protecting water quality in our communities and ecosystems. Here’s a few engineering solutions that address today’s common water quality challenges on the coast.

Manage Groundwater for Quality Community Drinking Water

Groundwater pumping supplies quality potable water for communities. As populations increase along the coast, the demand for groundwater extraction grows with it. When excessive pumping occurs, it can lead to saltwater intrusion into freshwater aquifers, resulting in salty-tasting brackish water.

Removing salts and dissolved minerals calls for reverse osmosis treatment, a more expensive process than conventional freshwater treatment. Preventing saltwater intrusion from the start is one of the best ways to maintain an affordable drinking water supply. Using real-time monitoring, utilities detect rising salinity levels early and respond before intrusion becomes a larger problem.

Prepare Infrastructure for Stormwater Challenges

Stormwater infrastructure keeps coastal waters clean by capturing, conveying, storing, and treating runoff before it reaches bays, estuaries, and beaches. These systems help reduce pollutants, such as phosphorus and nitrogen, which can fuel algal blooms and degrade water quality. Since stormwater originates from many sources—rainfall, hurricanes, and flooding—managing it is a real challenge. This is especially true in aging systems. When infrastructure can’t keep up, stormwater runoff contributes to water quality problems and harms marine life.  

Proactive master planning efforts help address these challenges by identifying infrastructure updates every five to ten years. This helps plan for growth, trends, treatment, distribution, and collection needs for a 20–30-year period. Hydraulic modeling can further support these efforts by helping municipalities evaluate system performance and make informed decisions about future growth and infrastructure investments.

Find New Solutions to Address Wastewater Challenges

Septic tank effluent in rural areas poses challenges for groundwater. It can affect drinking water supplies and introduce contaminants into intercoastal waters, harming marine life. Many treatment systems were not designed to withstand major storms, and efforts to improve their resilience can be costly.  

To work around this ongoing threat, Florida is funding infrastructure projects across the state to eliminate the use of septic tanks. Through “Septic to Sewer” initiatives, communities are replacing septic systems and installing gravity or low-pressure sewer columns for residential customers and businesses.

Protect Coastal Water Quality with Smarter Monitoring

Protecting coastal water quality begins with proactive planning, resilient infrastructure, and advanced monitoring technology. Real-time systems continuously track changes in water conditions, identifying trends and detecting contamination. Tools, such as continuous water quality sensors, automated samplers, remote telemetry stations, GIS dashboards, and mobile field monitoring, measure key indicators, like nutrients, salinity, and bacteria.  

By delivering timely, actionable data, these technologies open the door to faster decisions, protecting public health, coastal ecosystems, and community water systems.

To learn more about clean water initiatives, contact us.