After 22,000 public comments, several dozen big-time meetings of the minds, and five years in the making, the new guidelines for how to release the polluted water from Lake Okeechobee is official.
The “Lake Okeechobee System Operating Manual,” or LOSOM, was created in response to a long-time cry of injustice. That cry came from just about every environmental group involved in the Everglades restoration and resident who lives along the waterways used by the Army Corps of Engineers to lower the lake levels by releasing water filled with decades of fertilizer and urban runoff.
“LOSOM won’t solve all of our problems, but it will lower the number of damaging discharges, which transport massive amounts of polluted lake water into our estuarine ecosystems,” said Matt DePaolis, a director with the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation.
“As more Everglades restoration projects come online we will be able to worry less about the impact that Lake Okeechobee has on our coastal environment and focus more attention on cleaning up our own watershed.”
Simply said, LOSOM is a set of guidelines on how, when, and where water will be released from Lake Okeechobee.
In the past, lake water has been sent down the Caloosahatchee River, St. Lucie River, Lake Worth Lagoon, and into the Everglades.
The new regulations, made official this week by Brig. Gen. Daniel Hibner, means the agency must balance the need for water to be released with the effects on the environment. Hibner is commander of the Army Corps division that includes Florida.
The catalyst for the sign-off was the strengthening of 143 miles of the Herbert Hoover Dike that encircles the lake, completed last year after two decades and nearly $2 billion. A stronger dike can more confidently be relied on to hold more water.
The takeaway is that many people whose interests have been negatively affected by how the water has been released in the past should be happier — even if everyone didn’t get everything they wanted out of the revised plans.
Now there should be few releases of the polluted lake water east into the St. Lucie River, which empties into the already-polluted Indian River Lagoon near Stuart, and smaller, beneficial amounts of water released west into the Caloosahatchee River instead of sustained surges of billions of gallons of water a day for months at a time.
When filtering reservoirs are completed to the south of the lake, clean and clear water will flow down toward Florida Bay at the southern tip of the peninsula, restoring at least some of the natural flow of the River of Grass.
Friends of the Everglades is one of many environmental nonprofits heavily engaged with the Army Corps to make the new operating manual reality.
“This is a big deal,” the group wrote in its newest newsletter. “The Lake Okeechobee System Operating Manual marks a significant change in how the Army Corps of Engineers will move water in and out of the lake for the next decade (and it) is the first plan to consider public health by weighing the risks of toxic algae when managing water from Lake O.”
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