The Army Corps of Engineers has stopped releasing 3.5 million gallons of water daily from Lake Okeechobee into the Caloosahatchee River for two weeks to allow the environment to recover.
Recover from what? And why, if it’s known the environment is being harmed by the releases, are the releases happening at all after holding water in the Big Lake for most of the winter months?
It’s well-established that water released from Lake Okeechobee is polluted with nutrients like phosphate and nitrogen, much of which critics contend come from large agricultural operations near the lake such as Big Sugar and other farmers.
During the past six weeks, the Army Corps has released tens of billions of gallons of polluted water from Lake Okeechobee, lowering the lake level by nearly a foot. Water has been sent at millions of gallons-a-day velocities westward down the Caloosahatchee River, eastward down the St. Lucie River, and in one smaller river.
Army Corps Col. James Booth decides whether to leave water in the lake or open the gates to one or more rivers. On a conference call with reporters on Friday, he said he stands by his decision because the wetter-than-normal winter did not allow the lake level to lower like it normally does from November-on.
“My change in thought process was mainly to the flood risk present,” Booth said, referring to what might happen if the Herbert Hoover Dike surrounding the lake let water get through and threaten towns to the south.
“I’m pretty confident," Booth said of his decisions. “I fully acknowledge that this has some regrettable environmental impacts on the estuaries.”
The impacts of released nutrient-polluted freshwater into rivers, where it will mix with saltwater flushed by the tides, have many possible impacts on the ecosystem's flora and fauna. Not the least of those is an outbreak of blue-green algae.
“We’re concerned,” said James Evans, leader of the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation. “Flows have been in the damaging range for the past 36 days.”
Evans said his biggest concern is if the Army Corps restarts the releases from Lake Okeechobee in a few weeks, which Booth said he will determine later this week after reviewing long-range weather forecasts as hurricane season approaches.
“We're hearing now that these discharges could continue into June,” Evans said. “Which means that in addition to the impact that they'll have on the oysters and the fishes that spawn in the estuary, they’ll also have an impact on the seagrasses that are starting to grow and thrive in the estuary.”
Captains for Clean Water, another active water-quality nonprofit in Southwest Florida, issued a statement that expressed their displeasure with the Army Corps’ decisions as well.
“After 42 days of high-volume, damaging discharges to both the east and west coasts of Florida, the Army Corps of Engineers will be implementing a two-week ’rest period’,” the statement said. “The intent of the rest period is to allow salinity levels to rebound in the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie River estuaries, which have seen a dramatic, harmful decline since freshwater discharges from Lake Okeechobee began.”
The captain’s group contends the “damaging coastal discharges can come with myriad impacts to our waters, destroying foundational habitat, proliferating or supercharging harmful algal blooms like red tide and blue-green algae, and crippling South Florida's economies that depend on clean water.”
In January, the captain’s group was joined by SCCF and Conservancy of Southwest Florida to release a report warning that the next massive red tide or blue-green algae outbreak could be a multi-billion-dollar disaster if the bloom locked into place along Charlotte, Lee, and Collier county’s coasts.
“Our region's economic and ecological well-being hinges on the health of our water. Yet, while there’s almost universal agreement that our water fuels our economy, our water quality continues to decline,” Rob Moher, president of the conservancy, said at the time. “We cannot afford to wait any longer for meaningful action to clean up and protect our precious water resources.”
The only solution, according to environmental groups, lies in the Everglades restoration.
When completed years from now, the efforts are designed to clean the polluted lake water naturally while being held in separate filtering ponds, then released southward to restore the natural flow of the River of Grass.
The freshwater will travel down the Shark River Slough to Florida Bay at the southern top of peninsular Florida, where it will mix with saltwater from the Atlantic Ocean restoring one of the most unique ecosystems in the world.
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