The arbiter of the Ever­glades retires

By Court­ney Robishaw

One could call Stu­art Appel­baum the ref­er­ee of the Flori­da Everglades.

Appel­baum helps play an impor­tant role in the day to day deci­sions of how much water every­one in South Flori­da is going to get as well as over­see­ing a plan that will take 30 years to imple­ment and cost more than $13 bil­lion to pro­vide a more per­ma­nent fix to the Everglades.

Appel­baum is chief of the plan­ning and pol­i­cy divi­sion of the U.S. Army Corps of Engi­neers in Jack­sonville and after 30 years he retires May 3.

“I’m com­fort­able with pass­ing the baton on to oth­ers to take the next steps to restora­tion,” he said.

A native New York­er, Appel­baum has an unob­tru­sive appear­ance that belies the pow­er he has wield­ed. He received his bach­e­lors of sci­ence from Poly­tech­nic Insti­tute of New York in civ­il engi­neer­ing and his mas­ters of sci­ence in water resources engi­neer­ing from George Wash­ing­ton University.

Through­out his career, Appel­baum has tried to bal­ance the dif­fer­ent inter­ests of the Ever­glades, includ­ing those of agri­cul­ture, flood con­trol, devel­op­ment, water man­age­ment and environmentalists.

“The Corps pro­vides a lot of exper­tise where we have to rec­on­cile and bal­ance all these dif­fer­ent inter­ests, so obvi­ous­ly each inter­est is try­ing to max­i­mize things to their advan­tage,” he said.

On a reg­u­lar basis the Corps, along with advice from many dif­fer­ent par­ties, decides how much water to flush out of the Ever­glades sys­tem to the oceans and how much to leave in the Ever­glades. It is a con­tin­u­al point of conflict.

Those in the agri­cul­ture dis­trict would like to see more water stored so that in the event of a drought, they can have a back-up water sup­ply for their crops.

How­ev­er, because of safe­ty con­cerns for the dike sur­round­ing Lake Okee­chobee, water is stored at an opti­mal depth between 12 feet and 15 feet.

Con­verse­ly flood con­trol inter­ests want to keep water stor­age as low as possible.

“We’re try­ing to bal­ance a vari­ety of inter­ests and we’re in the mid­dle,” said Appelbaum.

The ulti­mate solu­tion is to enlarge the amount of water avail­able and increase water stor­age in the sys­tem. This would not only solve the inter­ests of flood con­trol man­agers and farm­ers, but it would enable the 6.5 mil­lion peo­ple who live around the bor­ders of the Ever­glades in South Flori­da to have enough drink­ing water.

“We’re try­ing to enlarge the water pie, so we can store a lot more water in the nat­ur­al sys­tem and the envi­ron­ment obvi­ous­ly needs a lot more water than it’s cur­rent­ly get­ting, so we can also pro­vide water for agri­cul­ture and urban water sup­ply,” Appel­baum said.

“The way to bal­ance things is to enlarge the water pie and that allows all the dif­fer­ent sec­tors to have a big­ger piece of the pie,” he added.

But such efforts take years to accomplish.

One of Appelbaum’s first sig­nif­i­cant eco­log­i­cal projects was the restora­tion of the Kissim­mee Riv­er. Orig­i­nal­ly a hun­dred-mile-long riv­er, the Kissim­mee had been bro­ken up by a canal and the restora­tion project restored much of the nat­ur­al flow of the riv­er by remov­ing two areas of canals. The Kissim­mee project has won praise from many diver­gent groups.

Appel­baum also over­saw the plan­ning of the Ever­glades Sky­way, a one-mile long ele­vat­ed por­tion of the Tami­a­mi Trail along U.S. High­way 41. The road had been cut­ting across the Ever­glades, essen­tial­ly serv­ing as a dam block­ing the nat­ur­al flow of water. The bridge allows water to trav­el under­neath, restor­ing some of the orig­i­nal water flow.

While Appel­baum called the bridge “his­toric” toward hydro­log­i­cal con­nec­tions, he added: “More of that will need to be done in the future.”

Appel­baum has also over­seen man­age­ment of the Her­bert Hoover Dike, which sur­rounds Lake Okee­chobee. Built in response to two destruc­tive hur­ri­canes in 1926 and 1928 in which close to 3,000 peo­ple lost their lives due to flood­ing, the dike is con­tin­u­al­ly a man­age­ment issue.

Cur­rent­ly, the Corps is reha­bil­i­tat­ing the dike, because in 1930 when the Corps was first autho­rized to con­struct the dike, engi­neer­ing was a lot less tol­er­ant to risk than it is today. The foun­da­tion of the dike is very porous, espe­cial­ly when the lake reach­es high­er elevations.

“At 21 feet [the max­i­mum depth of Lake Okee­chobee], there is a 100 per­cent chance the dike would col­lapse,” said Appelbaum.

Appel­baum is sad to leave the Ever­glades restora­tion project, but he is opti­mistic about its future.

“Since this is some­thing I start­ed way back in the begin­ning, obvi­ous­ly there is some sad­ness with leav­ing with the job not being com­plet­ed,” he said. “Because it is going to take 30 to 35 years, I’ve always rec­og­nized it was going to tran­scend me.”