The essential problem in the South Florida Water Management District, or less bureaucratically, the huge watershed that is South Florida, is that it used to be a huge shallow slick of fresh water that ran unabated for more than half the length of the Florida Peninsula, from the Kissimmee Lakes near Orlando, all the way to the sloughs and shallows in what is now Everglades National Park. The Everglades were, well, ever-glades, a glade that went on forever, 4,000 square miles.
Man’s ingenuity changed all that. After a flood caused by a hurricane in 1938 I believe, and the demands of road building, agriculture and population increase after Henry Flagler’s railroad started to bring Americans into the sub tropics, they set about controlling this water for farming, flood control, and accidentally by road building, in some profound ways. Canals were built for every reason imaginable, 1400 miles of them and their buddies, levees and water control devices, according to Wikipedia, and the ecosystem was brought to it’s knees, albeit in ways you had to pay attention to see, since it was hard to notice going by at 75 mph on Alligator Alley.
If you want to see how complex this can be, check out this tour of just one small part of the system that is relevant to the 3rd project I cover below, the water flows out of Lake Okechobee:
tour of flows out of Lake Okechobee via canals
Water supply to the area south of Tamiami Trail, essentially the National Park, fell to something like 1/10 it’s original amount, and rivers were straightened and diverted to the coasts. For some 70 years there were voices in the wilderness, the Endangered Species Act brought attention to the Florida Panther, but things got bad and stayed bad. The reef in what is now the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and the segreses i the park started to deteriorate due to Nitrogen from every manner of sugar farming, cattle ranching, contaminated condo hot tub overflow, and orange grove, that created blooms of all sorts of stuff that shouldn’t be blocking the sunlight to the coral, so what little water did make it is almost making things worse. On a mega scale, the lack of fresh water entering the gulf Stream as it rounds south Florida on it’s way to England is now so weak the Stream has allegedly changed color. But finally the South Florida Water Management District, the lead body for this area, The Army Corps of Engineers, and the State and Federal Elected Officials involved started to get their act together, and stuff is happening, or was funded and some of it still happening, even though Florida elected a tea Party Governor who stripped these budgets in 2011..
What, you say? Progress? Well, government being government, there was a lot of analysis, a lot of putting the whole picture together, then there was a long wait for money… and the project spans so many areas and congressional districts, I had always focused in my searches on the southern ends, the most famously impacted area, Everglades National Park, due to the partial impassibility of water over the Tamiami Trail, US 41, which is kind of the core problem of the everglades, along with the controversy over the sugar lands purchases that had been such an almost perfect then fall back into a kind of controversial ‘Sugar Daddy’ deal by ex Governor Charlie Crist, and it caused me to miss this pretty amazing project, change creeping in from the edges flowing from the north like the water:
http://www.sfwmd.gov/portal/page/portal/xweb%20protecting%20and%20restoring/kissimmee%20river
it was turned into a ditch, the C-38 canal, now it’s allowed to be a river again:
Images of Kissimmie River Restoration
somehow one picture alone doesn’t quite tell the tale, so I had to link to a bunch.. all the maps also don’t quite show what an aerial photo does of how it was a straight run, and now there are river bends and meanders again, and wetlands and groundwater replenishment.
Video tells the story best…
if you keep digging in, you start to realize the massive scale of this one bit of the everglades restoration project ( and the massive scale of the damage done by the canals all over Florida.), and the results of the rebound are quite stunning…fantastic in fact..
They have a ways to go, but they have restored about a quarter of the some 80 miles of former river that were channelized into canal.
satellite of completed areas of Kissimmie River Restoration zoom in a notch or two and it becomes more apparent, since the wider satellite images are older.
Go Army!
So this change from the edges notion lead me to another morsel, another precious piece of already federally funded progress:
http://www.floridaforestservice.com/state_forests/picayune_strand.html
digging into the story of Picayune Strand State Park, formerly The Golden Gate Estates, sold by the Gulf America Corporation
http://www.conservancy.org/page.aspx?pid=1061
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_land_scams
It’s everything you want from a South Florida story, no doubt the stuff of Carl Hiaasen or Tim Dorsey Novel.. but the work is getting done:
http://www.evergladesplan.org/docs/fs_picayune_nov_2012_508.pdf
it’s a bit complex to see what has actually been done, but it looks like at least a few of the roads and canals have been removed, and the project should be done by the summer of 2015
http://www.evergladesplan.org/pm/projects/project_docs/status/proj_30_current.pdf
and life is no doubt moving back in..
Up north a big project around the Indian River Lagoon, a long federally protected refuge estuary on the east coast of Florida north of Lake Okeechobee also has been moving forward. The issue there is that when the lake is too high water get’s pumped into the St. Lucie river via the C-44 canal and a few others, and it deluges the lagoon with dirty, sugar field fertilizer contaminated fresh water that used to (this will be a theme), flow naturally into the everglades. They decided to make a bunch of settling ponds and change the flows so instead of being pumped right down the canal, they settle out the contaminants and then flow down the river more naturally, further filtering and not crashing in late in the game via the canal like a packed on ramp to I-95 during the regular afternoon traffic jam.
The public on both coasts are clamoring for this project because it also affects the Caloosahatchie River and it’s estuary which get’s some of that untreated Okeechobee runoff in the same man controlled rushes which screws up fishing, clamming etc. with algae blooms and other changes to salinity and ecological balance.
But wait Grandpa Grumpy, you keep talking about the stuff on the edges, but what about the real problem, water not getting to the south of the Tamiami Trail, and all the run off from Sugar Production near Lake Okeechobee?
You caught that, did ya? smart group of li’l gators..
Alright kids, on to part 3..
