Don't go near the water

To the editor: The Village of Florida has written a grant to apply a herbicide to Glenmere Reservoir, its drinking water. While the Village Board has contracted studies to demonstrate the effects of this herbicide, the company they contracted is the company that will apply the chemicals to Florida’s drinking water. Fluridone is a toxin that breaks down into carcinogenic metabolites - cancer-promoting chemicals that remain in drinking water for years. Does anyone in Florida want these carcinogens collecting in their children’s bodies? This herbicidal cycle does little to actually eradicate the target plants. It simply damages one generation of plants while creating the need for reapplication. Residents of Greenwood Lake stood united in keeping herbicide applicators from poisoning their lake with “Fluridone” and they don’t even drink that water. There are safer. more effective alternatives. Florida needs to study all options, not just those suggested by the firm that would make thousands by implementing them. Four trained divers were hired to pull these plants from a much larger lake with more effective and less costly results than carcinogenic chemicals. Such a program, locally, would generate nice summer work for locals instead of paying a big, out-of-town pesticide firm. Local divers would cost taxpayers less money, be more effective, and would not expose Florida’s residents to carcinogens in the water they and their children drink and bathe in. Of course, out-of-town herbicide applicators wouldn’t make thousands of dollars, then. See www.glenmere.us to learn more. We can learn now, the easy way, or later, after years of exposure. Jay Westerveld Sugar Loaf