ALACHUA — Two hundred feet beneath the cherry tomatoes, chopped lettuce and ranch dressing at the Sonny’s BBQ salad bar, millions of gallons of crystal-clear water flow through a massive, dark maze of underground caves.
The Mill Creek cave system is one of the most advanced dives in Florida. It sits just off the intersection of I-75 and U.S. Highway 441 in Alachua. In 2003, explorer and underwater cinematographer Wes Skiles documented what it’s like to swim through these winding waters for his documentary, “Water’s Journey: The Hidden Rivers of Florida.”
He traced the water’s path from rainy sinkholes through porous limestone and into the vast expanse of the Floridan Aquifer.
In one memorable scene, Skiles tracks cave diver Tom Morris from above ground as Morris swims through the Mill Creek system. This tracking leads Skiles to the local Sonny’s BBQ.
“They’re heading towards the salad bar!” Skiles’ colleague Brian Pease announces, much to the confusion of midday diners.
This was actually just a bit of movie magic.
The cave system that blossoms from Mill Creek doesn’t pass directly under Sonny’s BBQ.
Instead, it hides under a thick forest cover a few hundred feet away. There, an aptly named “swallet” swallows Mill Creek deep underground, spits it out briefly into a steep, 50-foot sinkhole, and gulps it back down into the state’s freshwater lifeline: the Floridan Aquifer.
Twenty-one years after the film, and 14 after Skiles’ death during a routine dive in South Florida, this strange aquatic portal behind Sonny’s is back in the spotlight.
Cave divers including Morris fear that a proposed development could contaminate the aquifer, which supplies drinking water and bubbles up to fill the springs, which are already suffering from pollution and declining flow. Developers say the swallet is safe.
The Alachua City Commission will decide who to believe. On a date not yet announced, commissioners will vote on whether to grant final permission to build Tara Forest West: a 523-home neighborhood between Lowe’s and the Mill Creek swallet north of U.S. 441.
A muddy, overgrown sinkhole
Tom Morris drove this stretch on an afternoon earlier this month. Just past Lowe’s, a billboard appeared, advertising Tara Phoneicia: another venture of Sayed Moukhtara, developer of proposed Tara Forest West.
In 2022, Alachua County Commissioners blocked Moukhtara from moving forward with a 70-home subdivision on the West End Golf Club property after citizen protest.
Although he halted that “Tara Club” development, he has continued with others, including Tara Baywood, Tara Greens and Tara Esmeralda, according to the state’s Division of Corporations.
His daughter’s company, Nemer Real Estate, advertised forested land on a white FOR SALE sign a bit further up the road. Neither Moukhtara nor his daughter, Silvia Moukhtara Nemer, who is also involved in the development companies, returned WUFT’s requests for comment.
Abruptly, Morris turned on his hazards, slowed down and guided the car over a sidewalk and into tall grass. His wife’s tiny Toyota Prius lurched over the bumpy ground. “Nancy hates me to drive her car. I go off road,” he said, smiling.
He passed the for-sale sign without a second glance and drove towards the treeline. Worn tire tracks in the grass led the way. Branches whipped the windows as he entered the forest.
“Well, here it is!” he announced, parking the car in an unassuming clearing.
He hopped out of the car, impressively spry at 77 years old. (Cave diving demands it.)
“Ah hang on, let me find a spider stick,” he said. “You want one that looks kinda like a deer antler.”
Moving his way through the brush, he whacked spiderwebs out of the way until reaching a wooden staircase. A sign to his left claimed ownership of the unruly land. National Speleological Society — Nature Preserve.
This was the entrance to the Mill Creek system: a pine-covered, mosquito-infested sinkhole with water the color of over-steeped tea.
“Sometimes that basin will look really nasty, green and brown and dirty,” said local cave diver and dive shop owner Kristi Bernot. “Once you get beyond that layer, it opens up and it's beautiful inside. It’s very white walls, very, very blue water,” she said.
Two hundred feet underground, a clay-banked cave system funnels water into the Floridan Aquifer.
That water may travel thousands of miles and spend hundreds of years underground before bubbling out in one the region’s famous springs or coming out of a homeowner’s tap.
“This is such a critical site for groundwater,” said Morris. “We need to really think long and hard about ‘do we want to pack it full of houses?’”
The climate-driven development boom
Like much of the state, the City of Alachua is on a fast track of development. Florida has the highest net migration in the country, with more than a thousand people arriving each day.
Interior counties of the state like Alachua are migration hotspots. They receive not only out-of-state arrivals, but also in-state migrants, including those from Florida’s coastal regions who are driven out by rising sea levels and storms.
According to Alachua County’s July 2024 Climate Vulnerability Assessment, climate migrants alone could increase the county’s population 8% by 2100.
That may even be an underestimate, said Rich Doty, research demographer and GIS coordinator at the University of Florida's Bureau of Economic and Business Research, which created the climate migration projections included in the assessment.
“There's so much we don't know about the timing and the level of human adaptation in response to sea level rise,” he said. “We don't know exactly when things are going to happen. We don't know how long we can engineer our way out of this. We don't know what the insurance market is going to do.”
Rising costs — in addition to sea level rise itself — will likely bring people from Miami, St. Petersburg, Ft. Lauderdale and “all the major metros and coastal areas,” Doty said.
More people means a higher demand for housing.
The Florida 2070 report was a collaboration between the University of Florida’s Geoplan Center, 1000 Friends of Florida and the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. It found that, if development and water consumption continue at 2016 rates, roughly a third of land in North East Florida will be developed by 2070. Development-related water demand will increase in the region by 120%.
Contamination in Cave Country
For some Alachua residents, it’s a breaking point. A petition opposing the development had more than 1,700 signatures as of Friday.
At an Aug. 13 “Our Alachua Water” citizen meeting, people sat on the floor, leaned against doorways and strained to listen in from the foyer. Nearly a dozen of them were cave divers.
Divers call this part of Florida “Cave Country.” Its Swiss cheese-like limestone and afternoon thunderstorms are ideal elements for forming caves. Water picks up carbon dioxide as it travels underground, dissolving the soft stone and gradually creating —then widening— holes.
To dive in the aquifer’s caves is to swim through the liquid heart of Florida. People come from around the world to do it.
Bryan Buescher and Vickie Bashor first dove north Florida’s caves in 2003. They came back every year, sometimes for months at a time, before moving permanently from California to High Springs in 2018.
Now, they dive three to five times a week.
“It's like if you were to go to the national parks: Zion and Bryce and the Grand Canyon and that sort of thing,” said Buescher, “except here it's all underwater. So you see these geologic features that are just phenomenal.”
Buescher dove the Mill Creek system in November 2023. He described cavernous walls striped with multicolor clay and dark, narrow passageways dropping 215 feet. “Just the scale of it is immense,” he said, “it’s by far one of my favorite systems to dive in.”
Still, Buescher believes the system could quickly become contaminated by stormwater.
Rain collects fertilizers sprinkled onto residential lawns, motor oil leaking out of exhaust pipes and other chemicals, channeling them into stormwater basins. These basins — often low, grassy areas — allow water to seep through soil and vegetation, filtering out pollutants like nitrates and phosphates before the water enters the aquifer.
For filtration to work, the water needs to move slowly. The region’s Swiss-cheese terrain makes that difficult.
A 2022 study by researchers at the University of Central Florida (UCF) found that stormwater basins in karst terrain may quickly leak into the aquifer below.
By analyzing three basins in the Silver Springs springshed, the researchers found that surface water quickly reached the springs, either by snaking its way horizontally through the soil or dropping vertically into the deeper, Floridan Aquifer.
The surface route is like a country road with traffic backed up behind a tractor. Soils and roots block water’s path, pulling out contaminants. The deeper route is a highway. Water in the study reached speeds up to 22 miles an hour when moving through karst.
“Slower transport would allow more time for nutrient uptake and transformation,” said Kelly Kibler, a UCF water-resources engineering professor and leader of the study.
In other words, faster-moving groundwater may speed up pollutants to the aquifer.
Kibler emphasized that her study’s findings about stormwater’s path into the aquifer are specific to Silver Springs, but may signal more broadly that karst regions may be particularly sensitive to contamination from stormwater.
At a July 22 Alachua City Commission meeting, Moukhtara assured residents that four stormwater basins on the site will collect and filter runoff before it enters the aquifer. “We are really not trying to do anything that is harmful,” Moukhtara said.
The Suwannee River Water Management District approved the project’s stormwater plans in December 2022. On June 11 this year, Alachua’s Planning and Zoning Board recommended approval of development by a vote of 3 to 1.
Tara Forest West met all of the City’s land development regulations, which include stipulations related to aquifer recharge and stormwater management.
Cave divers say it won’t be enough.
From sinkhole to springs
Stephen Hofstetter is the director of the Alachua County Environmental Protection Department.
“In general, any development in these karst sensitive areas, especially when we know there’s a cave system, there’s always a heightened concern that there could be direct impacts to our drinking water and aquifer,” he said.
The main concern is sinkholes. Since development changes an area’s landscape, it may direct large volumes of polluted water to places it didn’t naturally accumulate, explained Hofstetter.
The water pushes through pockets in the soil and underlying limestone, picking up carbon dioxide. It becomes more acidic and gradually eats away at the fragile limestone. When the limestone can no longer support the weight of the soil, a sinkhole is born.
The sinkhole is a direct channel to the aquifer, allowing polluted stormwater to rush in.
Sinkholes in stormwater basins are, “actually quite common, at least initially,” Hofstetter said. There have been recent sinkholes in western Alachua County, including one along Newberry Road that emerged in the wake of Hurricane Debby.
Alachua County requires that sinkholes be filled, generally with a mixture of clay, sand and rock, but days or weeks may pass between detection and filling.
The City of Alachua recognized the Mill Creek system’s sensitivity and, in 2022, built an artificial wetland to protect it.
The Mill Creek Sink Water Quality Improvement Project connects with the north end of Sonny’s parking lot, ushering water through a series of filtration ponds filled with local plants. Over time, these plants remove nitrogen and phosphorus from runoff before releasing the filtered water into natural wetlands that lead to the swallet.
Cave divers including Buescher and Morris applaud it. But will it manage runoff from Tara Forest West? “Not at all. Zero,” Morris said.
The artificial wetlands are west of Mill Creek while the proposed development is east of it.
The creek is the area’s low point, so stormwater from the development will drain directly into the swallet, Morris said, never reaching the project’s wetlands.
Instead, runoff will enter the swallet and travel under U.S. 441, down an ancient scar in the earth’s crust called the cross-country fracture zone and out into the swimming area of Hornsby Springs at Camp Kulaqua.
This path was plotted by a 2005 dye trace study by Morris and Pete Butt, owner and project manager of Karst Environmental Services.
With 40 pounds of environmentally-safe dye, 900 charcoal filters and many, many hours of waiting, the pair showed that, within 12-15 days, dye poured into Mill Creek swallet wound up at Hornsby.
When it's dye making this trek, the worst that can happen is a crayfish or two turn the color of Easter eggs. But when it’s an herbicide or fertilizer, Morris explained, the consequences can be off-putting to swimmers and deadly to aquatic life.
In 2021, a contractor applied 67 pounds of the herbicide metsulfuron-methyl by air over the Tara Forest site to clear weeds for development.
The helicopter spraying alarmed some neighbors, but Alachua County confirmed it followed the label’s guidelines and was not done directly over Mill Creek swallet.
Still, Morris recalled the effects of runoff from a similar herbicide spraying in Edwards Spring, where U.S. Highway 90 crosses the Suwannee River.
“I raced over and sure enough, lots of dead crayfish,” he said.
While tiny aquatic animals such as crustaceans and mollusks don’t have the charm of the aquifer’s larger creatures, they’re its built-in filters. Without them, pristine waters can turn murky.
These impacts could potentially be felt throughout the aquifer’s path, including at Hornsby Spring at Camp Kulaqua, a nearby retreat and conference center. The possibility caught the attention of Alachua County, which owns a conservation easement on 198 acres of Camp Kulaqua.
A city-county clash
On Aug. 15, the Board of County Commissioners sent a letter to City of Alachua Mayor Gib Coerper, announcing “affected party” status in discussions about Tara Forest West. Such status allows the county to present testimony and evidence when the development is up for final approval.
The city of High Springs, meanwhile, has claimed “intervenor status,” a higher level of involvement.
Hofstetter’s team is currently compiling and analyzing data about the Mill Creek watershed and details of the proposed development.
“We're going to review all the studies and reports that link concerns with Mill Creek as well as hopefully provide some suggestions and strategies should any proposed developments move forward — what we'd like to see to help reduce potential impacts,” Hofstetter said.
Those strategies could include lining basins with nutrient-hungry materials; creating smaller, more dispersed basins so that sinkholes — should they form — release less contaminated water or even acquiring part of the land, “if that’s still on the table,” he said.
County environmental officials are scheduled to present their findings to their commision on Sept. 24.
This isn’t the first time that Alachua County and the City of Alachua have clashed about the Mill Creek system.
In 2006, the county challenged a stormwater permit issued to a proposed Walmart supercenter southeast of the I-75 and U.S. 441 intersection. In a settlement, Walmart agreed to store fertilizers under a roof, add landscaping in its stormwater basin and a dozen other stormwater regulations
In 2015, the City of Alachua voted to rezone 154-acres around the proposed Walmart to allow the store to be larger.
The Alachua County and the National Speleological Society (NSS) filed lawsuits against the city and four landowners — Walmart again among them — saying that the area was too environmentally sensitive to support development.
After months of debate, all parties except the City of Alachua agreed to a settlement.
Walmart and the other landowners committed to implementing stormwater systems that move water away from Mill Creek. In return, the NSS and Alachua County agreed to drop all lawsuits and not file future ones against the four landowners. Since the City didn’t agree to the settlement, they are not protected from future lawsuits.
The Walmart supercenter was never built.
Now, cave divers and other members of “Our Alachua Water” are once again calling on the county and the NSS to intervene. They’re trading their oxygen tanks and diving gear for the dais, rallying to keep the waters behind Sonny’s salad bar running clean.
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