ST. JOHNS, Fla. — An active investigation has been launched into what riverkeepers said could be possible pollution in the St. Johns River.
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The City of Jacksonville’s Environmental Quality Division is investigating, according to the advocacy specialist for the St. Johns River.
Action News Jax received a video, Wednesday morning, of what appeared to be murky, discolored sediment in the St. Johns River near the Peninsula building on the Southbank.
“From the video, it looked like a sedimentation, sort of runoff, and generally you see that coming from an existing construction site or maybe a facility in the area that would be potentially doing irresponsible development,” Soraya Aidinejad said.
Aidinejad is the Advocacy Specialist with the St. Johns River and explained this could have negative impacts on the waterway.
“If this is sedimentation runoff, water polluted with sediment, which can prevent natural submerged aquatic vegetation from growing and therefore threatening food sources of wildlife relying on it as well as can become a contributing factor for fish deaths,” Aidinejad said. “Runoff can pick up fertilizer, oil, pesticides, dirt, bacteria, and other pollutants that are harmful to the river and the organisms that rely on the river.”
It’s not clear yet if this is any sort of pollution. Aidinejad said they weren’t able to see sediment from the ground level, but it is being looked into.
“Once we find the source, we can kind of get in deeper on the kind of contamination that this would be,” Aidinejad said.
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