NATU R E FOR THE MASSES At the Culligan bottling plant in Panama City, Econfina water is trucked in (top, right), filtered, irridated and bottled (below), before being shipped to area Culligan customers.
it a first magnitude spring — one of only five such springs in Northwest Florida and 75 in the country. The creek’s main beneficiaries are the people who drink out of their taps in Bay County. The creek flows into Deer Point Lake Reservoir, which supplies Bay County’s drinking water. Johnny and Jimmy Patronis thought that bottling the creek water for sale to the general public just made good business sense. “When you’ve got a spring, it’s all you ever think about,” Johnny Patronis says. The icy creek’s location is idyllic. Just off State
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Road 20, it’s easily accessible for transportation vehicles that draw the water. And the stream is in a protected area, surrounded by 1,800 acres of Patronis family land and bordered by a little more than 39,000 acres of protected land owned by the Northwest Florida Water Management District. The Patronis brothers are the only ones with an individual water use permit within a mile buffer of Econfina Creek, though there are various users that operate under a general water use permit, such as a number of private residences that fall within the buffer. The seclusion has been a crucial blessing
for the creek, which gets nearly half of its average flow from Floridan Aquifer Springs (water filtered through sand and limestone). The rest comes from rainfall runoff. “One of the biggest threats to the water quality would be the release of nitrates from septic tanks if there was rural lakefront development,” says William Cleckley, the water management district’s director of the Division of Land Management and Acquisition. “We protect the water supply in Bay County by preserving the groundwater recharge area property.” Sandy soil created a perfect environment for the clear spring water, but not for farming. The absence of industrial centers and large farms with dangerous pesticides, combined with the natural addition of beneficial silica beds and limestone that filter nearby shallow sand ponds, provides one of the purest natural spring waters in the world.
A Partnership Emerges Econfina began working with Panama City-based Culligan Water Services Inc. in 2000, bottling the crystal clear spring water in five-gallon jugs, then eventually single serving bottles.