Bridget Bruchalski
•7/13/2026
LABELLE, Fla. (WINK)—A massive sewage spill in LaBelle is raising questions about what's moving through Southwest Florida's waterways.
The city says 450,000 gallons of raw wastewater entered a drainage ditch. Neighbors say the impact is already hard to ignore.
Gary Murphy's wife didn't just smell the treatment plant. She smelled a sewage spill.
"My ex-wife, she said, 'Do you smell that?' I said, 'No, I don't. I don't. I don't smell it, but I smell that plant all the time,'" Murphy said.
"That's too much. Too much," Murphy said. "That's why it stinks. That's why it smells."
For neighbors like Murphy, the concern is what that water could carry with it.
"It could cause some skin problems, or you know, skin parasites or whatever. And if they swallow the water, they need to be warned not to swallow the water," Murphy said.
But this spill isn't just about where it started. It's about where it goes next.
"It just got diverted instead of making it to the wastewater treatment plant. There it went into our stormwater system, ultimately into a creek. The creek's headed to the Caloosahatchee," said Dr. Nora Egan Demers, an environmental health expert.
Demers says this spill is two and a half times bigger than the largest spill ever recorded in the Fort Myers area.
"I don't like to call them spills because this—you know you spill water. This is a disaster when 450,000 gallons of toxins, which is what our wastewater is, gets put into the environment," Demers said.
So what are the concerns?
"The immediate concern that we hear the most about with all of these is algal blooms," Demers said.
But it's also about what can build up over time.
"All of those chemicals releasing into the water affect all of the organisms in the water, and ultimately the other organisms, the non-human animals, are indicators of what's happening in the humans," Demers said.
The city of LaBelle says crews are working to contain and clean up the spill. They're using vacuum trucks to remove contaminated material, lime to help collect solids and containment measures to slow sediment from moving through the water.
But Demers says even after that, concerns remain.
"Certainly, treatment dramatically reduces the amount of nutrients, but it's still crazy too high," Demers said.
The best thing people can do right now is give the area some space. That means avoiding swimming, fishing, kayaking or boating in and around the spill area until more is known.
The city of LaBelle says they will be testing the water both up and downstream from the spill.
Correction: This story has been updated after the interviewee clarified that the spill was two and a half times larger than the largest recorded in the Fort Myers area, not the state as initially reported.
