The Army Corps of Engineers is planning to open three spillways in the dike surrounding Lake Okeechobee this weekend, releasing torrents of water every day to lower the water level before the summer rainy season.
The majority of the 68 million gallons of fresh lake water — polluted with nutrients that can foster blue-green algae and red tide — will be released into the Caloosahatchee River.
Much of the rest will be sent eastward into the St. Lucie River, where it will flow into the Indian River Lagoon, a waterway already so impaired that fish starve for oxygen and manatees starve to death.
“There's the risk that this could trigger a full-blown ecological crisis on both coasts,” said Gil Smart, director of VoteWater, a nonprofit founded by Stuart residents a decade ago to stop releases of polluted water from the Big Lake into the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers. “It's going to play havoc with oysters. It's going to play havoc with seagrass.”
“There's the risk that this could trigger a full-blown ecological crisis on both coasts. It's going to play havoc with oysters. It's going to play havoc with seagrass.”Gil Smart, director of VoteWater, a nonprofit founded by Stuart residents a decade ago to stop releases of polluted water from the Big Lake into the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers.
Downstream in the Caloosahatchee, the water rich in nitrogen and phosphorus will mix with brackish water, then saltwater, with seasonally bad timing that Smart and many other environmentalists fear will foster algae blooms that will not be small nor spotty.
“If these discharges have to continue into the algae season and we start getting algae, it's going to be a nightmare for those who live along the estuaries,” Smart said. “It's going to kill living things.”
From then to now
Lake Okeechobee plays a crucial role in the Everglades ecosystem. For centuries Lake O filled up, over-topped its southern banks, and flowed all the way to the southern tip of Florida, where the purest of fresh water mixed with the salty Atlantic Ocean.
The process was the heartbeat of the entire Everglades ecosystem, and nearly every creature in the Big Swamp counted on that natural rhythm for hundreds if not thousands of generations.
Then mankind thought draining the Everglades would be a great idea because the ground underneath would be great for farming, or upon which to build cities like Miami and Fort Lauderdale. Not aware that Lake Okeechobee regularly drained to the south, people took advantage of the rich soil and built homes and planted farms.
The natural rhythm, however, would not be denied. Throughout the 1920s there were floods, but true devastation came in September of 1928 when the Great Okeechobee Hurricane struck. Levee’s failed, massive flooding inundated surrounding communities, and at least 2,500 people died. It remains one of the deadliest natural disasters in United States history.
Fast forward nearly 100 years and today Lake Okeechobee is surrounded by a super-dike 143 miles long that was completed last year. The massive earthen berm is a quarter-mile-wide at the base in places, and much of the southern side has massive slabs of domino-shaped concrete feet thick and dozens of feet tall shoved down the middle of the Herbert Hoover Dike.
As of Friday, the lake level was 16.3 feet, but that is deceiving because it is not how deep the lake is, it is how high the surface of the lake is above sea level. The actual depth of the lake rarely tops ten feet.
Still, the lake is so far around that it holds at least one trillion gallons of water. And with few discharges of any significance during the past few months, the lake level has risen to within inches of the height where Army Corps engineers who designed the dike would no longer be comfortable.
And with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicting more rain during the usually dry winter season, the spillways are being opened Saturday to the east, west, and some more will be sent south to the Lake Worth Lagoon.
"It's important to be able to accept water into the lake during the summer without the lake getting too high," Major Cory Bell, second in command at the Army Corps' Jacksonville office, said in a recent conference call. "We must consider higher releases before the onset of the hurricane and rainy seasons."
Environmental groups miffed
The region’s environmental groups have wondered why the Army Corps has been waffling in recent weeks about starting the releases because even though some water from the lake is beneficial in certain cases, it is never welcome when it is close to resembling a flood.
The Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation said the Army Corps is going to be “sending damaging freshwater flows into the river’s estuary” and wonders why the agency has kept the lake higher than normal since Hurricanes Ian and Nicole raised levels by over two feet in 2022.
“Since those storms, the Army Corps has been working to manage the lake, attempting to lower it at times, and ‘banking’ water when it deemed releases were not prudent,” said Matt DePaolis, SCCF’s environmental director. “Now, however, a wetter dry season due to El Niño has prevented the drawdown we normally expect to see during the drier winter months.”
DePaolis said the Caloosahatchee River’s estuary relies on a balance of salt and fresh water to provide the appropriate balance within the ecosystems to support tape grass, seagrass, oysters, and other estuarine organisms.
Too much fresh water entering the system for too long, he said, can stress organisms past their tolerance levels.
“If the releases continue into oyster spawning season there is a risk of damaging future oyster populations,” DePaolis said. “SCCF will be engaging the Army Corps to ensure they do what’s best to protect the health of the ecosystem.”
Large releases can also transport and fuel harmful algal blooms in the estuary, as these water flows can carry blue-green algae from the lake. Heavy flows from the lake could provide nutrients that could fuel a future red tide bloom.
“A large red tide bloom would be devastating to our wildlife, our environment, and the economy of our islands,” DePaolis said. “Coastal communities are still recovering from Ian almost a year and half later.”
A recent report by SCCF, Captains for Clean Water, and the Conservancy of Southwest Florida shows that a severe harmful algal bloom has the potential to cost the region’s coastal communities more than $5 billion in economic output, and the loss of 43,000 jobs.
Dan Andrews, one of the founders of Captains for Clean Water, said Friday’s news was “really frustrating” and why his group was founded in 2016.
“The Army Corps of Engineers just announced they are going to initiate high-volume discharges from Lake Okeechobee to both the east and west coasts starting this Saturday,” Andrews said in an Instagram post. “Situations like these are why we founded CFCW in the first place—to put an end to the damaging discharges that wreak havoc on our ecosystem, our communities, and our economy.”
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