Tampa Bay

Tampa Bay is a large natural harbor and estuary connected to the Gulf of Mexico on the west central coast of Florida, comprising Hillsboro Bay, McKay Bay, Old Tampa Bay, Middle Tampa Bay, and Lower Tampa Bay. The surrounding area is home to about 4 million residents, making it a heavily used commercial and recreational waterway but putting much stress on the bay's ecosystem, which once teemed with enough wildlife to easily support an extensive indigenous culture. Much greater care has been taken in recent decades to mitigate the effects of human habitation on Tampa Bay, and water quality has slowly improved over time.

The term "Tampa Bay" is sometimes used as shorthand to refer to all or parts of the Tampa Bay area, which comprises many towns and cities in several counties surrounding the large body of water. Local marketing and branding efforts (including several professional sports teams, tourist boards, and chambers of commerce) commonly use the moniker "Tampa Bay", furthering the misconception that it is the name of a particular municipality when this is not the case.

Tampa Bay Water

Tampa Bay Water is a regional wholesale drinking water utility that serves customers in the Tampa Bay, Florida region. The agency is a special district of the state created by inter-local agreement among six member governments. A nine-member board of directors composed of two elected commissioners from each member county and one elected representative from each member city oversees the policy decisions of the agency. The member governments that make up the board of directors are: The cities of New Port Richey, St. Petersburg, Florida, and Tampa, and Hillsborough County, Pasco County, and Pinellas County. These member governments provide water to over 2.5 million citizens.

Tampa Bay Water, formerly the West Coast Regional Water Supply Authority, was created in 1998 to deliver drinking water in an environmentally sound, cost-effective and reliable manner. To achieve these goals, the Agency created a diversified water supply system to reduce dependence on a sole source—groundwater. The regional utility built the C.W. Bill Young Regional Reservoir of 15,500,000,000 US gallons (59,000,000 m³), a seawater desalination plant with a maximum output of 25,000,000 US gallons (95,000 m³) per day, a surface water treatment plant with a maximum output of 120,000,000 US gallons (450,000 m³) per day, and interconnected more than 200 miles (320 km) of large-diameter pipeline. The system spans over 2,000 square miles (5,200 km²) to deliver drinking water at an average rate of 171,000,000 US gallons (650,000 m³) per day.

Tampa, Florida

Tampa /ˈtæmpə/ is a city in and the county seat of Hillsborough County, Florida, United States. It is located on the west coast of Florida on Tampa Bay, near the Gulf of Mexico, and is part of the Tampa Bay Metropolitan Area. The city had a population of 346,037 in 2011.

The current location of Tampa was once inhabited by indigenous peoples of the Safety Harbor culture most notably the Tocobaga and the Pohoy, who lived along the shores of Tampa Bay. The area was explored by Spanish explorers in the 16th century, resulting in violent conflicts and the introduction of European diseases, which wiped out the original native cultures. Although Spain claimed Florida as part of New Spain, it did not found a colony in the Tampa area, and there were no permanent American or European settlements within today's city limits until after the United States acquired Florida from Spain in 1819.

In 1824, the United States Army established a frontier outpost called Fort Brooke at the mouth of the Hillsborough River, near the site of today's Tampa Convention Center. The first civilian residents were pioneers who settled near the fort for protection from the nearby Seminole population, and the small village was first incorporated as "Tampa" in 1849. The town grew slowly until the 1880s, when railroad links, the discovery of phosphate, and the arrival of the cigar industry jump-started its development, helping it to grow from a quiet village of less than 800 residents in 1880 to a bustling city of over 30,000 by the early 1900s.

Water

Water (chemical formula: H₂O) is a transparent fluid which forms the world's streams, lakes, oceans and rain, and is the major constituent of the fluids of organisms. As a chemical compound, a water molecule contains one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms that are connected by covalent bonds. Water is a liquid at standard ambient temperature and pressure, but it often co-exists on Earth with its solid state, ice; and gaseous state, steam (water vapor). It also exists as snow, fog, dew and cloud.

Water covers 71% of the Earth's surface. It is vital for all known forms of life. On Earth, 96.5% of the planet's crust water is found in seas and oceans, 1.7% in groundwater, 1.7% in glaciers and the ice caps of Antarctica and Greenland, a small fraction in other large water bodies, and 0.001% in the air as vapor, clouds (formed of ice and liquid water suspended in air), and precipitation. Only 2.5% of this water is freshwater, and 98.8% of that water is in ice (excepting ice in clouds) and groundwater. Less than 0.3% of all freshwater is in rivers, lakes, and the atmosphere, and an even smaller amount of the Earth's freshwater (0.003%) is contained within biological bodies and manufactured products. A greater quantity of water is found in the earth's interior.

Adventure Island

Adventure Island may refer to:

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