St. Petersburg: do not flush the cooler to the drain

Florida Yacht Stabilizers · Updated 8 October 2026

The answer at a city berth

Warm Gulf water grows in raw-water strainers and stabilizer coolers. Opening the strainer is ordinary. Where the flush goes is the city rule. St. Petersburg Code Section 27-431 makes it unlawful to discharge sewage, industrial waste, petroleum, or any other contaminant into public waters or the municipal separate storm sewer, directly or indirectly. Subsection (c) limits the storm sewer to discharges composed entirely of stormwater. A cooler flush that carries oil, or even a bucket of biological sludge poured to a drain, is not stormwater.

• Use the city section, not Pinellas County’s unincorporated stormwater article.
• Section 27-433 prints a $500 fine and an order to stop. That is not a diagnostic price.
• Verify seawater flow before you blame the gyro vacuum. The installation manual says to.

The rule in this city

Chapter 27, Article IV, accessed 8 October 2026, holds the text. Section 27-430 says the division exists so the city can meet the Clean Water Act duty to run its separate storm sewer. Section 27-432 lists exceptions — water-line flushing, irrigation, air-conditioning condensate, individual residential car washing, emergency firefighting — and an NPDES permittee discharging within that permit. A yacht stabilizer cooler is not on the exception list. Section 27-433 lets the person officially designated POD order an improper discharge to stop immediately, allows injunctive relief, awards the city costs and a reasonable attorney’s fee, and sets the fine for each violation at $500.

St. Petersburg holds its own NPDES permit. The county coastal plan says so, and the county pollution page describes a different fine, up to $10,000 a day, for the county ordinance. That is not § 27-433. The city fine is $500 per violation. The county article does not cover this incorporated berth.

Fouling is why the strainer comes apart. The Seakeeper 1 installation manual, doc. 90519-1, 22 May 2020, tells the installer to override the seawater pump on and verify flow at the outlet before startup, and it notes the flywheel can take more than two hours to coast down after shutdown. No flow is a cooling fault. It is not, by itself, a vacuum fault, and it is not a license to dump the strainer into a city inlet.

If you skip the drain rule

Hose the strainer into the scupper because the dock is busy, and § 27-431(c) is the sentence you skipped. If the cooler has been leaking oil into the seawater side, the petroleum prohibition is the sentence. POD can order the discharge to stop. The fine is $500 for each violation, and the city can ask a court for an injunction and its fees. The gyro still needs flow. You have added a code case to a clogged strainer. The boat does not get a cleaner cooler by moving the solids into the storm system.

Who signs, who pays, how long

How the next place differs

Checklist for this berth

1. Confirm the boat is in the city, not Tampa and not unincorporated Pinellas.
2. Bag strainer solids. Do not hose them to a gutter or scupper.
3. If the seawater side is oily, treat it as petroleum under § 27-431, not as cooling water you can spill.
4. Verify flow at the outlet before you condemn the vacuum.
5. Keep the $500 figure in the fine column, not in a price quote.

Fee or timeline the document prints

The only dollar amount § 27-433 prints is the $500 fine per violation. It does not print a wait time for a POD inspection and it does not print a price to clean a cooler or to read a vacuum history. The installation manual’s coast-down note — more than two hours on a Seakeeper 1 — is a machinery fact, not a city fee. Verify any service price with the yard after the discharge path is legal.

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