“Get­ting the water right” is cru­cial for the future of the Everglades.

By Court­ney Robishaw

Motorists dri­ving along U.S. High­way 41, the Tami­a­mi Trail in South Flori­da, often have to slow down or come to a stop because of ongo­ing con­struc­tion. When they do, they like­ly see con­crete struts sup­port­ing flat con­crete blocks ele­vat­ed about 10 feet in the air, stretch­ing for one mile.

But for those who pushed for this $81 mil­lion project, they are more like­ly to envi­sion some­thing else-the orig­i­nal sheet flow of water once again pass­ing across the Flori­da Ever­glades when the con­struc­tion is completed.

For years peo­ple have tried to get rid of the water in South Flori­da. Now many are fight­ing for more of it. These include every­one from the cities on the South Flori­da coasts, the farm­ers, land man­agers in Ever­glades Nation­al Park, envi­ron­men­tal­ists and others.

Ever since we real­ized our efforts to con­trol and tame the water in the Ever­glades was actu­al­ly harm­ing the frag­ile ecosys­tem, we have been try­ing to repair the dam­age. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, this will nev­er happen.

“It is impos­si­ble to restore the Ever­glades as we once knew them,” said Lar­ry Perez, a sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tions inter­preter at Ever­glades Nation­al Park. “Fifty per­cent of the Ever­glades have now been lost, but take those rem­nant parcels that still remain and re-plumb the sys­tem, re-engi­neer it as best we can to mim­ic the nat­ur­al tim­ing, quan­ti­ty, qual­i­ty and dis­tri­b­u­tion of water that moth­er nature orig­i­nal­ly intended.”

His­tor­i­cal­ly, rain­wa­ter that began falling near Dis­ney World in the north has flowed down the Ever­glades until it reached Flori­da Bay. The water nat­u­ral­ly flowed south, because South Flori­da is essen­tial­ly a slight ramp. Some have com­pared the ele­va­tion around Lake Okee­chobee to the sec­ond floor of a two-lev­el house, while Flori­da Bay’s ele­va­tion is the ground floor.

Some of that water would be caught, in the north, in Lake Okee­chobee, until it peri­od­i­cal­ly and nat­u­ral­ly over­flowed. The sed­i­ment in the runoff cre­at­ed the very fer­tile, “black gold” soil of the agri­cul­tur­al region.

Then canals, dikes and dams were built and inter­rupt­ed this entire nat­ur­al sys­tem. One of the bar­ri­ers was the high­way called the Tami­a­mi Trail from Naples to Mia­mi. The ongo­ing con­struc­tion is designed to pro­vide an out­let so that the water can again flow south into Ever­glades Nation­al Park.

Today the sys­tem is com­plete­ly and arti­fi­cial­ly man­aged by the U.S. Army Corps of Engi­neers and the South Flori­da Water Man­age­ment Dis­trict, with influ­ence from oth­er groups.

“Engi­neers on com­put­ers are like God let­ting water move around,” said Neil San­taniel­lo, a pro­fes­sor of jour­nal­ism and for­mer envi­ron­men­tal reporter.

Stu­art Appel­baum, chief of the plan­ning and pol­i­cy divi­sion of the U.S. Army Corps of Engi­neers, said man­age­ment of the water in the Ever­glades is not easy.

“We have to think of it as one inter­con­nect­ed sys­tem, before try­ing to solve one prob­lem with­out caus­ing anoth­er prob­lem some­where else,” he said.

In today’s sys­tem water is released from Lake Okee­chobee and it then runs through a series of canals, dikes and gates. Some of the water sys­tem, and its pumps, are huge. One pump sta­tion called the S5A is one of the old­est, built in 1955 and has one the largest capac­i­ties to pump water in the world, designed to pump a 230 square mile area.

Every Tues­day morn­ing, the Army Corps of Engi­neers has a con­fer­ence call with water man­agers, flood con­trol spe­cial­ists, farm­ing inter­ests, and wildlife and envi­ron­men­tal offi­cials to decide how much water to release from the lake into the system.

A depth of 12 feet. to 15 feet. is con­sid­ered ide­al for the lake, but this is only achieved one-fourth of the time. The lake is extreme­ly shal­low, no more than 10 feet in most places, and it can eas­i­ly be influ­enced by both droughts and hurricanes.

Farm­ers want the lake to be deep­er, since they use about a foot of water from the lake, accord­ing to Paul Gray, Lake Okee­chobee sci­ence coor­di­na­tor for the Audubon Soci­ety of Florida.

If water man­agers kept the water lev­el of the lake too high, there is a 100 per­cent chance the Hoover Dike sur­round­ing the lake would col­lapse, due to ero­sion and holes in the bot­tom of the dike, if the water lev­el reached 21 feet, accord­ing to Appelbaum.

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

The ulti­mate solu­tion is to com­plete the ongo­ing long-term restora­tion of the Ever­glades, which includes the work at Tami­a­mi Trail and else­where. The major piece of that work is the Com­pre­hen­sive Ever­glades Restora­tion Plan, signed in 2000 and now esti­mat­ed to take 30 years and cost more than $13 bil­lion. It was devel­oped to restore the ecosys­tem of the Ever­glades and insure that there is a large enough water sup­ply for the grow­ing pop­u­la­tion of South Florida.

The most cru­cial goal of the Ever­glades restora­tion is to “get the water right,” because it is so cru­cial to so many dif­fer­ent inter­ests. If the water is not right, South Flori­da could become a desert, accord­ing to Lisa Jame­son, a biol­o­gist at the Arthur R. Mar­shall Lox­a­hatch­ee Nation­al Wildlife Refuge.

All of which will take time. For instance the Ever­glades Sky­way project on the Tami­a­mi Trail was first intro­duced in 1989 and it was not until 2009 that was ground bro­ken. Now, motorists are still wait­ing for its completion.