Who was Garald Parker? A former Oregon teacher, Parker went to work for the U.S. Geological Survey in Miami just before World War II. Through years of field work, he uncovered the secrets of Florida's underground water system, mapping the vital aquifers that give us most of our drinking water. In 1955, he published his findings in a landmark, 1,000-page report, which resulted in the creation of the state's water management system and sounded the first alarms against overpopulation. Today [07/05/2005] would have been his 100th birthday.

Like a brilliant doctor feeling the pulse of a patient whose skin was hundreds, even thousands of feet thick, Garald Parker over half a century ago mapped out the veins and arteries of South Florida's life's blood: Water.

SAWGRASS PRAIRIE SCHOONER: Garald Parker in the middle of the Everglades atop a cleat-treaded tractor he used to get around, while mapping the Biscayne Aquifer in the early 1940s. [larger image]

Today [07/05/2005] would have been Parker's 100th birthday. He died, aged 95, in 2000. In a career that spanned 35 years, he discovered the Biscayne Aquifer and identified the vast Floridan Aquifer, the most important in the state.

Few people have heard of him, but he is revered almost as a god by state hydrologists and geologists. His monumental 1955 report, humbly titled "Water Supply Paper 1255, Water Resources of Southeastern Florida," ran to just over 1,000 pages and resulted in the establishment of Florida's five Water Management Districts.

"It's unparalleled," said Peter Swarzenski, a scientist who works for the U.S. Geological Survey in its St. Petersburg office. "Garald Parker was instrumental in alerting Florida that groundwater was going to become a valuable commodity."

Parker also influenced Marjory Stoneman Douglas powerfully, when she was writing her famous book, The Everglades: River of Grass. He explained the whole system to her and even helped her with the title.

"I said, 'Mr. Parker, do you think I could get away with calling it a river of grass?' And he said 'Well, I think you could,' " Douglas said in her preface.

Despite Parker's landmark Paper No. 1255, Florida didn't establish water management districts until 1972 and even today we are water-drunkards, gulping the stuff down, spewing it seaward, believing it is an infinite, free resource to be spent and enjoyed, not husbanded and prized. Parker would shake his head in disbelief at the bonfire of development that is going on down here today. He thought the situation was already getting out of hand in the mid-1950s.

"The rapid increase in population in southern Florida during the past two decades has been phenomenal," Parker wrote. "The result has been a radical change in the natural hydrologic balance."

Then, gently, he added:

"Some changes, which were not anticipated, have had deleterious effects."

"Deleterious," as in, salt water intrusion caused by excessive freshwater withdrawals, at the rate of 5 inches inland a year near Tampa.

"Deleterious," as in the phosphorus-poisoning of Lake Okeechobee, from cattle waste and fertilizer runoff.

"Deleterious," as in an increasing reliance on surface water, lakes and rivers, for drinking water: Surface water is only one chemical spill away from toxicity.

TESTING THE WATERS: Garald Parker and his son, Garald Jr., out in the early 1940s. Parker discovered the Biscayne Aquifer and named the Floridan Aquifer. Parker Jr. remembers an idyllic boyhood, accompanying his dad out into the Everglades, 'catching fish and bugs,' while his father observed and took notes. 'I was kind of his field hand,' he said. [larger image]

"Deleterious," as in that Florida's teeming southern counties are threatening to start "water wars," siphoning water off from the northern part of the state and piping it down here.

Already big companies like Nestle and Perrier's Zephyr Hills have set up bottling plants in Florida, sucking the water out of the ground and paying nothing for it. Water is legally still free in Florida. Already the biggest desalinization plant in the Western Hemisphere is located near Apollo Beach on Tampa Bay. When it gets up to capacity, it will produce 25 million gallons of fresh water a day from the Gulf of Mexico.

Parker mentions none of these in his report, save salt water intrusion into coastal wells, which was already occurring in his day. He couldn't see that far into the future, but everything he worried about is starting to come deleteriously true.

In a sense, every Floridian is a water-millionaire, born rich. Not only do we get 53 inches of rainfall a year, equal to Alabama's and surpassed only by Louisiana's 55 inches, but we sit atop a gigantic limestone rain-barrel, the Floridan Aquifer, which extends up through Georgia and parts of Alabama and South Carolina, and which is one of the most bountiful, fresh-waterlogged geological formations in the United States.

Parker named it.

The existence of the Floridan Aquifer was suspected as early as 1913, and preliminary mapping of its vast depth and extent had been done in 1936, but Parker is the man who nailed it down. It is an astonishing, enormous limestone formation, 60 million years old and, under Polk County, 3,000 feet thick: More than twice the skyward loft of the former World Trade Center towers.

Alas, the Floridan Aquifer plunges deep underground by the time it reaches us, and is overlaid by the Biscayne Aquifer, a much shallower, less-abundant source of water.

It was World War II that brought Parker to Florida from Oregon, his son Garald Parker Jr. said. Immediately he became interested in finding out just how much water there was here, and where it came from.

Parker grew up on an Oregon dairy farm, received a teaching degree from Oregon Normal School and taught science, social studies and math at several schools in Washington state. But after getting a master's degree in geology from the University of Washington, Parker took a job in 1940 with the geology survey in Miami.

Parker Jr. remembers an idyllic boyhood, accompanying his dad out into the Everglades, "catching fish and bugs," riding on a cleat-treaded tractor that looked like a little Caterpillar bulldozer across huge savannahs of sawgrass, while his father observed and took notes. "I was kind of his field hand," Parker Jr. said.

Garald Parker in later years with his wife, Bernadette. Parker died in 2000 at age 95. Bernadette lives in Tampa. [larger image]

"My main memories are of swimming and running around barefooted and hanging out with my dad. We had no heat, we had no air conditioning. Mosquitoes? We just swatted them," the son said.Parker's work in the 1940s included a lot of consulting for the military, which was building bases in the area.

"The military needed a lot of water and nobody knew how the system worked," Parker Jr. said. "There had never been a need for a big water supply in Florida, Florida was so sparsely populated then. You could dig a well anywhere in South Florida, 10 or 20 feet deep, and fresh water would just gush up out of it and you'd have a flowing well.

"My father told me shrimpers and fishermen would be out at sea in Biscayne Bay and ram a pipe down into the ocean a few feet into the sea bottom, and fresh water would just come gushing up through it."

Discovering the secrets to Florida's underground water system did not happen quickly.

"There was no one 'Eureka!' moment," the son said. "It happened gradually, over many years. They would drill test wells and see what came out. Then they would test the water chemistry and it would provide a signature of where it came from.... Really it was like poking fingers into the earth. It was an evolutionary thing."

Why didn't Parker simply name the Floridan Aquifer after himself?

He wasn't that kind of man, his son replied. He was too much of a scientist.

"The Floridan Aquifer is so big, I think he believed that it didn't belong to any one man or any one place."

What kind of man was Parker in person?

"Always working. His primary interest was his work. When he wasn't out in the field, he was in his study at our house off Coral Way, going through his papers. I guess you could say he was a typical father of that age. There was no doubt about who was the boss. He taught me the science and he led me into engineering. He was always a teacher. His joy in life was giving lectures. He was a very magnanimous man."

The University of South Florida gave Parker an honorary doctorate 20 years ago. A memorial to him was dedicated in the Green Swamp, in Polk County, on June 21, 2001, a year and a half after he died.

"Water is life," Parker said in an oral history recorded at Gainesville before his death. "Without water, we have nothing. Without water, we die."

Paper No. 1255 is out of print, but may be read in its entirety online at http://sofia.usgs.gov/publications/papers/wsp1255/contents.html

Above article by Michael Browning, 1948-2006. For more information about Mr. Browning, please visit:

• http://www.palmbeachpost.com/pbccentral/content/local_news/epaper/2006/12/30/1230browning.html
• http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2007/01/michael_browning_the_best_of_u.html

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