Tag Archives: Everglades

125 Years Later, Retracing Willoughby’s Across the Everglades

-Across the Everglades was written in 1897 by Hugh Laussat Willoughby, Thurlow Library.“Hugh Laussat Willoughby, a Sewall’s Point winter resident for 32 years, was one of the Treasure Coast’s most colorful characters,” writes my mother Sandra Thurlow in her book Sewall’s Point, The History of a Peninsular Community on Florida’s Treasure Coast. 

While in my youth, the stories I heard about Hugh Willoughby really shaped my Weltanschauung. My historian mother often referred to him a “braggart,” but he certainly earned it! He led a life of adventure even “at home.” He flew an early airplane over the St Lucie River taking some the first aerials photographs; he partnered with Captain Henry Sewall for whom Sewall’s Point is named, together they developed Port Sewall. As a kid, I thought that parts of the War Hawk aeroplane Willoughby built could be found at his Sewall’s Point property on the St Lucie River, Mandalay. Willoughby’s life was the stuff of dreams and he lived in my hometown. I still think of him every time I take a walk. Over the past few years, I watched the remains of his beautiful estate get developed and endured witnessing the clueless developer tear down the ancient night blooming cactus vines and giant old trees…

So why am I speaking of Hugh Willoughby? I am writing this blog today because right now Willoughby’s memory is being honored for another famous and remarkable accomplishment of his -in 1897, he crossed the Florida Everglades and in 1898 wrote Across the Everglades, an American classic.As I write, a team of adventurers and scientists, are retracing a modern day Willoughby path. Their website reads: “In  recognition of the 125th anniversary of Hugh Willoughby’s daring Everglades crossing and the 75th anniversary of the creation of Everglades National Park: The Willoughby Expedition.”

Willoughby was the first to test Everglades’ waters, this team will test for many substances but one especially Willoughby would never have imagined, micro-plastics. Another, through the help of Dr Fred Sklar, SFWMD, invasive apple snails.

The group pushed off from the Harney River on October 27th, and as of October 31, 2022 at 12:26 pm, the team was located, along the Tamiami Trail’s L-29 Canal. Of course when Willoughby explored these waters 125 years ago Florida was a wilderness unlike today. In fact today, cities, airports, and roads have been built out into the once Everglades. These are the words of Chief Navigator Charlie Arazoza explaining to me the path from today until the last day:

“The 31st we come out of the wilderness and into civilization. We launch from the North bank of the Tamiami canal across from the bridge and paddle to the Tamiami Canal Park on 6th Street and 127 ave. Straight line canal paddling with several portages, come for the day or come for a slice. Halloween at Belen!

On the 1st of November we leave the park and paddle down the Tamiami, hang a left at the Palmetto, come through Blue Lagoon and spend the night under the LeJeune overpass into the airport. Join us for the paddle, or join us for a drink when it’s over.

The last day of the expedition, we launch under the overpass, paddle 50 yards, and get out again to drag our boats across Melreese golf course around the last floodgate. That puts us less than a mile from the river and then down the river we go. Final destination, Bayside.”

You can follow along on their website and on November 19th they will be giving a report of their travels at 1pm at the Cox Science Center in West Palm Beach. May we continue to work to educate and revive the Everglades health. Gratitude and thanks to the all reliving history and setting new scientific baselines 125 years later by retracing Willoughby’s Across the Everglades!

LEARN ABOUT THE THE WILLOUGHBY EXPEDITION 2022

MEET THE TEAM

Support Team Members

Listen to Co-Expedition Leader Harvey Oyer’s Willoughby Expedition presentation to the SFWMD

-Map insert of Willoughby’s track across the Everglades 1897, Across the Everglades.

-Hugh Willoughby in aviation attire. He flew often over the St Luice River after his adventure across the Everglades. Historical Society of Martin County.

11-1-22

A message and some photos sent from expedition co-leader Harvey Oyer: Awesome!

“Being greeted by Mayor of Miami Dade County last night when we landed at Belen Jesuit School on banks of Tamiami Canal. Three canoes of Belen students paddled with us from our exit from the sawgrass back to Belen where they hosted a dinner for us.” Harvey Oyer -Screen shot of location 11-1-22 6:25pm. 

11-3-22

Co-expedition Harvey Oyer wrote: “We finished yesterday. 7 days, 6 nights, no major injuries…”

So exciting! I can’t wait to hear more about this modern day historical journey! I will be reporting. ~jacqui tl

11-9-22

Thank you to Captain Frank Adams of Naples who sent these photos from Hugh Willoughby’s first edition of Across the Everglades. There were four.

12-11-22

Channel 10 ABC Affiliate report on Across the Everglades and its impact on students.

The Heart of the 1947 Central and South Florida Project, the SFWMD

Everglades National Park, JTL

Sometimes the history of the Everglades is really confusing.  Why, with all of the environmental advocacy, since the 1970s, does the health of our environment remain crippled?  One way to simplify it is to think in terms of before and after the 1947 U.S. Central and South Florida Plan. Of course there is extensive history before 1947, but it was after 1947 that things in South Florida’s water world became culturalized, compartmentalized, and legally defined. Before we talk about this 1947 Central and South Florida Plan, let’s review some important highlights pre-1947.

1. Hamilton Disston begins the drainage of Lake Okeechobee (1881)

2. Governor Napoleon Broward hires U.S.D.A. scientist James Wright who determines that “eight canals would indeed drain 1,850,000 acres of swampland” (1904)

3. The U.S. Congress’ Rivers and Harbors Act  includes significant funds to deepen  the manmade Hamilton Disston connection of the Calooshahatchee River to Lake Okeechobee (ca.1910)

4. The scandal of James Wright (from #2 above) who was deemed “a fraud” for the failure of the land to drain as expected ~causing the slump in swampy real estate sales (1914)

5. The resurgence of confidence in sales and a 1920s real estate boom fueled by advances in soil science, and the success of agricultural start-ups located in Moore Haven, Belle Glade, and Clewiston south of Lake Okeechobee

6.  Land in a defined “Everglades Drainage District” more fully being systematically cut into sections for development with canals draining agricultural fertilizers and other chemicals into the waters of the state (1924)

6. Two very powerful hurricanes causing thousands of deaths and the destruction of property, and thus the state’s “call for a higher dike” (1926 and 1928)

7. The state’s reaction to the hurricanes, the 1929 establishment of the “Okeechobee Flood Control District” for the “Everglades Drainage District” as well as the Federal Government’s Army Corp of Engineers taking over “field operations”around Lake Okeechobee ~including the building of a thirty-five foot earthen dike and ingeniously using navigation funding to build the cross-state-canal, connecting the Caloosahatchee and the St Lucie Estuaries to Lake Okeechobee ~conveniently working as discharge-escapes through those estuaries when “necessary”

So, as we can see, a lot happened pre-1947, but it was what happened after, were things really changed…

In 1947 it rained and rained, and there were two hurricanes. From Orlando to Florida Bay the agricultural and developed lands, that had been built in drained, once marshy, swampy areas, really flooded, and in some places a foot of water sat for months. There was great economic loss.

The crying cow booklet, above, was sent to every member of the U.S. Congress.

The country as a whole was empowered with its post World War II success and prosperity, and with that same determination, the U.S. Congress came to Florida’s rescue…

To fight Florida’s destructive “flood waters” the 1948 U.S. Congress adopted legislation for the CENTRAL AND SOUTH FLORIDA PROJECT, a twenty year flood plan from Orlando to Florida Bay that included the formal creation and protection of the Everglades Agricultural Area south of Lake O, the Water Conservation Areas, intertwined with thousands of miles of canals and structures to control the once headwaters and River of Grass. HOUSE DOCUMENT 643 – 80TH CONGRESS (00570762xBA9D6)

Next, mirroring the same terminology the United States Government had used (the Central and South Florid Project) the state of Florida created the “Central and South Florida Flood Control District” to manage that CENTRAL and SOUTH FLORIDA PROJECT. A bit confusing huh? A tongue twister. And in a way one could say, at that time, the Central and South Florida Project and the  Central and South Florida Flood Control District “became one.” The overall goal above all other things was flood control. And this marriage of the Central and South Florida Project and the Central and South Florida Flood Control District was successful at controlling the waters, but it also killed the natural environment, thus Florida herself.

This embedded cultural philosophy of “flood control only” was challenged in 1972 with the birth of the national environmental movement, and a consciousness that the natural system that supported Florida’s tourism, quality of life, agriculture, not to mention valuable wildlife,  was in tremendous decline.

As Florida matured came Governor Claude Kirk, a republican,  in 1968, who was advised by environmentalist Nathaniel Reed. Then came Governor Reubin Askew, a democrat. The Florida Legislature, seeing the destruction of the state’s natural resources, passed a very important piece of legislation, the “Florida Water Resources Act,” today’s Chapter 373 in Florida Statures. (http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&URL=0300-0399/0373/0373ContentsIndex.html)

This law created five Florida water management districts with expanded responsibilities for regional water resources management including environmental protection not just flood control.

Accordingly, the Central and South Florida Flood Control District changed its name, but not its heart, becoming the South Florida Water Management District, we know today…(https://www.sfwmd.gov)

Everglades National Park, JTL

Buy it Like a Real Man! Florida Real Estate That Is… SLR/IRL

Historic real estate advertisement, ca. 1919 Pinecrest, FL, Museum of the Glades, https://www.museumoftheglades.org

I have been looking though my collection of maps and other Florida things, and I came across this remarkable real estate ad by W. J. Willingham. I would think it is from the early part of the 1900s when Barron Collier and James Jaudon, “Father of the Tamiami Trail,”  were developing South Florida. Apparently, Jaudon sold the land that became Pinecrest to Willingham.

What is of most interest to me is the tone of the ad, and how different is it compared to how we sell real estate today.  For instance, the first section reads: “Hesitation:” On the plains of Hesitation bleach the bones of countless millions; some men are just plain quitters, but the most pitiable sight in the whole world of failures, is the man who will not start. Opportunity will knock at your door this week and give you a chance to start. You can deny yourself one or two simple luxuries, drop a useless habit or two, and the start is made. You can own a Pinecrest lot. You can be a true-born American and take a shot at it and if you lose, you can take your loss like a real man. On the other hand, if Pinecrest makes a wonderful town, you can enjoy the pleasures invariably comes when a man uses his head and wins. My friend, it is up to you. Will you hesitate? Or will you start?  W.J. WILLINGHAM

Holy cow. This must have been the way one sold land in the Everglades in the old days, before political correctness, equal rights, and other things. Interesting to ponder, don’t you think? Maybe that’s why they mowed everything down.

Looking at the rest, Mr Willingham’s rant continues:

Here’s another duzzie: “Nerve.” That word nerve spells success. I was looking through some of old papers the other day and I ran across and old advertisement I put in a Florida newspaper a few years ago. At the at time I tried my level best to persuade someone to buy a certain property for $11,000. No one seemed to have the nerve. Finally I persuaded my brother to go in with me and buy it. All that was required a small  cash payment and just a little nerve. Now to make a long story short, we recently sold a part of that property for $137,000 and we have some o the property left. In a few short years you will wonder why you did not accumulate just a little nerve when Pinecrest was just starting. Pincerest has a mighty bright future. I am going to give you an opportunity to pick up a few Pinecrest lots at auction. W.J. WILLINGHAM

This is a good one, today we would write “Do you know of anything that has destroyed America’s Everglades more than Tamiami Trail?

W.J. Willlingham’s final words are a harsh motivator as well: “J.J. Hill Said:” James J. Hill, one of the greatest builders this county has produced, designated thrift as the one qualification without which no man could succeed. He said: If you want to know whether you are destined to be a success or a failure in life, you can easily find out. The test is simple, and infallible. Are you able to save money? In not drop out. You will lose. You may think not. But you will lose as sure as you live. The seed of success not in you.” W.J. WILLINGHAM

The seed of success not in you? Hmmmm. I agree with being thrifty, but how the “seeds of success change.” To be successful, the new developers of South Florida will have to adapt to our new world of rising seas, stronger storms, climate change, and the subtleties of selling to modern society. This could be a challenge; we may have to get some advice from the gators who have around a long, long time.

Alligator, public photo.

Links:

Pinecrest went on to be a very successful community. I wonder what the ads in the future will look like as it goes underwater…

Pinecrest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinecrest,_Florida

Pinecrest History: https://www.pinecrest-fl.gov/our-village/history

Pinecrest website: https://www.pinecrest-fl.gov/our-village

James Jaudon, Father of the Tamiami Trail: http://everglades.fiu.edu/reclaim/bios/jaudon.htm

Roads in the Everglades, Collier, Jaudon, Willlingham: https://books.google.com/books?id=oOvcDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA147&lpg=PA147&dq=wj+willingham+fl+pinecrest&source=bl&ots=TzcvzlZ04_&sig=1uugd2-UG8ag8B1QEy0IyD6oYzM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwitwbfgwIjeAhWqTd8KHXnuCVcQ6AEwA3oECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=wj%20willingham%20fl%20pinecrest&f=false

Physiographic Regions of Lake Okeechobee, What’s That? SLR/IRL

Water skiing in the St Lucie River/Indian River Lagoon at Michele White’s house with great friend Kevin Wilkinson, 1980.
The Boyer Survey: An Archaeological Investigation of Lake Okeechobee, 2011, Christopher Davenport and others
SFWMD before and after satellite image effect

As I got to “Physiographic Regions,” when reading the Boyer Archaeological Survey, I had to look up the definition of physiographic. My mind kept wandering to Physical Graffiti, the title of an album by Led Zeppelin, and the fun days of Martin County High School skiing the in St Lucie River/Indian River Lagoon with my best friends.

In retrospect, Lake Okeechobee and the St Lucie River were already dying by the time I was in high school. Today, I wish I had learned more about our ailing ecosystem when I was younger, and not finally caught on when I was 40 over ten years ago. “Catching-on,” this is my hope for the next generation as there are serious impacts we won’t be able to ignore, happening, and on the way. Knowing what “physiographic regions” means will help us understand what we can do.

Physiographic is defined simply as “the branch of geography dealing with natural features and processes.” So the Figure 5. map above shows what the surrounding ecological communities were before they became developed as today’s counties. These areas are labeled as the Eastern Flatlands; the Everglades; the Western Flatlands; Big Cypress Swamp; and the Mangrove and Coastal Marsh.

As we know the Everglades is one of the largest freshwater marshes in the North America and the world. It starts trickling up in the Kissimmee River Basin above Lake Okeechobee. Unfortunately, this area of the map is always cut off so we think in terms of south.

Basin Management Action Plans,. The Kissimmee River is north of Lake O. Florida. TCRPC doc. 2015.

The open marshes of Lake Okeechobee extended from the southern rim of Lake O and the Loxahatchee Slough south to the mouth of the Shark River Slough at Florida Bay and the former Miami River. Florida Bay is presently, and has been, experiencing extensive algae blooms due to lack of fresh water and the once beautiful Miami River, attached by canal (since 1911) to Lake O? “Dead.”

The Boyer Survey image once again for comparison.
Map of Canals 1924 Florida Archives.

The eastern and western flatlands to the east and west of Lake Okeechobee (Stuart/Ft Meyers ) were similar in vegetation types and animals. The Boyer Survey notes “both can be described as mosaic landscapes consisting of wet prairie, palmetto and dry prairies, pine forest or flatwoods, cypress forests, mixed swamp forests as well as ponds and sloughs; these areas were low, sandy, and poorly drained.” The Loxahatchee River drained the eastern flatlands into the Atlantic, and the Caloosahatchee River drained the western flatlands into the Gulf of Mexico. Today these waters flow by way of the ACOE/SFWMD Central & Southern Florida  project’s water control structures slowly making everything as “dead” as the Miami River.

Until we treat waterway funding like roads, (FDOT:http://www.fdot.gov/transit/functionsgrantsadministration.shtm) Mother Nature’s water highways will become even more of a backed-up, misdirected, putrid mess. We must stop trying to direct her like a God, and let more of her natural features return. After all, Nature is a House of the Holy and we never know when the Rain Song will begin…

The Rain Song, Led Zeppelin, Houses of the Holy, Album Physical Graffiti link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRt4hQs3nH0

1986 NYT article on first signs of algae in Lake Okeechobee: https://www.nytimes.com/1986/08/23/us/florida-fears-that-lake-okeechobee-is-dying.html

Water Quality Assessment of the St. Lucie River Watershed – Water Year 2017 – DRAFT- Gary Goforth, P.E., PhD. SLR/IRL

Dr. Gary Goforth ready to tour the SLR & Lake O.

It is a journey the state, federal, and local agencies don’t always wish to take–a journey to face the numbers of our watershed…

Today, Dr Gary Goforth (http://garygoforth.net) shares his most recent report, “Water Quality Assessment of the St Lucie River Watershed, For Water Year 2017, DRAFT.”

Mind you, for non-scientist people like myself, a “water year” is reported from May of one year, through April the next year, as opposed to a calendar year.

The full report is linked at the bottom of the post and contains numerous helpful charts. I have just included the key findings below.

Dr Goforth wanted to get the draft assessment out before the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s  Basin Management Action Plan workshop scheduled for this Friday Aug. 25th at 10:00 am at Martin County Building Permits Office, 900 Southeast Ruhnke Street, Stuart, FL 34994, Conference Rooms A & B because this is where the rubber hits the road! FDEP: (http://www.dep.state.fl.us/central/Home/Watershed/BMAP.htm)

Reflections in the St Lucie River, JTL

Water Quality Assessment of the St. Lucie River Watershed –Water Year 2017 – DRAFT Gary Goforth, P.E., Ph.D.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who watches the Watchers?)

Key Findings:
1. Over the last water year (May 2016 – April 2017), the surface water entering the St. Lucie River and Estuary (SLRE) in general was of poor water quality. The best water quality entering the SLRE was from the highly urbanized Tidal Basins. The largest source of phosphorus, nitrogen and sediment pollution to the SLRE was Lake Okeechobee discharges. The C-44 Canal Basin contributed poor water quality, and was the only basin demonstrating a worsening in water quality over the last ten years.

2. It was estimated that stormwater runoff from agricultural land use contributed more flow and nutrient pollution than any other land use, even contributing more flow than Lake Okeechobee discharges.

3. The annual Basin Management Action Plan (BMAP) progress reports produced by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection continue to indicate water quality conditions in the tributaries of the SLRE are better than they actually are. Examples of flaws in the BMAP assessment process include the omission of Lake Okeechobee pollution loads, the use of simulated data instead of observed data, the inability to account for hydrologic variability, and the inability to assess individually each of the major basins contributing to the SLRE.

4. An alternative to the assessment approach presented in the BMAP progress reports was developed and used to evaluate water quality conditions of major inflows to the SLRE and to assess progress towards achieving the Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) load reduction goals. This alternative approach uses observed data, includes Lake discharges, accounts for hydrologic variability, and is applied to each of the major basins contributing pollution loads to the SLRE. For WY2017, observed nitrogen loads to the SLRE exceeded the Phase 1 BMAP target loads (adjusted for hydrologic variability) by 77 percent. Observed phosphorus loads exceeded the Phase 1 BMAP target loads (adjusted for hydrologic variability) by 53 percent.

5. The largest single source of total nitrogen, total phosphorus and sediment load to the SLRE was Lake Okeechobee discharges. In addition, total phosphorus concentrations in Lake Okeechobee discharges to the SLRE remained almost four times the lake’s TMDL in-lake target concentration of 40 parts per billion (ppb). In 2017, the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) reported that phosphorus loading to the lake from surrounding watersheds was almost 5 times the Lake’s TMDL of 105 metric tons, yet staff acknowledged the agency does not enforce permits that set numeric limits on phosphorus discharges to the lake[1] (SFWMD 2016, SFWMD 2017). Unfortunately, despite the continued and well-publicized pollution of the lake, the Florida legislature in 2016 enacted a water bill that pushed back deadlines for achieving the lake’s TMDL by decades (Ch. 2016-1).

6. The best water quality entering the SLRE during WY2017 was observed in the highly urbanized Tidal Basins, with concentrations of 97 ppb and 819 ppb for TP and TN, respectively. Each of the remaining source basins, except the C-44 Canal Basin[2], exhibited a slight improvement in nutrient levels compared to their base periods, however, collectively these WY2017 loads did not achieve the alternative BMAP Phase 1 load target (Figures ES-1 and ES-2). The C-23 and Tidal Basins met the alternative BMAP Phase 1 target for TP, while the C-23, C-24 and Tidal Basins met the alternative BMAP Phase 1 target for TN. The predominantly agricultural C-44 Canal Basin exhibited poor nutrient conditions, and in fact, continued a trend of deteriorating nutrient conditions compared to its 1996-2005 base period. As a whole, the water quality entering the SLRE remains poor, although a slight improvement over the 1996-2005 period was observed.

FULL REPORT below: the complete report can be seen/downloaded from Dr Goforth’s website under “Estuaries and Lake Okeechobee:” http://www.garygoforth.net/DRAFT%20-%20Water%20Quality%20Assessment%20of%20the%20SLRW%20-%20Water%20Year%202017.pdf

Dr Goforth’s website:(http://garygoforth.net)

Army Corp of Engineer Structure S-80 releases water from Lake Okeechobee in the the C-44 Canal that leads to the St Lucie River. JTL
Lake Okeechobee.
basins of SLR/IRL SFWMD

 

Goforth Graph Showing C-44 Basin Runoff into Lake Okeechobee, 2017, SLR/IRL

In recent years we along the St Lucie River/Indian River Lagoon have been screaming because the ACOE and SFWMD have been discharging water from Lake Okeechobee and the C-44 basin into our waterways causing destructive toxic algae blooms and other issues to our area …

This year some are screaming because C-44 basin runoff water in southern Martin County is being pumped back into Lake Okeechobee. Yes, C-44 is “running backwards.” It’s a crazy world here in South Florida even through the water managers are working hard at “getting the water right…”

So two odd things are going on right now. First, water is being sent into Lake O from the C-44 canal as we were in a long-time drought, and also, now, water is being back-pumped into the lake from the south to help alleviate flooding in the Water Conservation Areas— as it has rained so much recently “down there.” This whole situation is exacerbated because the EAA,  in the middle, “is kept dry to protect the property of the agricultural industry and safety of communities south of the dike.”

SLR basins. C-44 and surrounding man-made basin is in pink. This is the area that is being back pumped into Lake O as the lake has been low due to drought. But area rains in southern Water Conservation Areas are so full water “cannot be sent south…” South Florida Conundrum…SFMWD, 2017.
The graph and short write-up below are from friend and engineer Dr Gary Goforth. The graph “shows” the C-44 basin runoff (see image above) being sent to Lake Okeechobee in 2017 compared to other years since 1980 (other than ’81) “is at 100%.”

I have also included some articles and images on the other “back into Lake O” subject. Back-pumping was made illegal in the 1990s, but is allowed under certain circumstances such as endangering communities and agriculture in the EAA, and danger to wildlife in the conservation areas due to flooding…All of this is “back-pumping” not good for the health of the lake. In all cases, it is helping one thing while hurting another…

One day we will have to truly get the water right. Images below may help explain things.

ISSUE OF BACK-PUMPING:

This satellite photo shows water on lands in 2005. One can see the lands in the EAA are devoid of water. This water has been pumped off the lands into the Water Conservation Areas, sometimes back pumped into the lake, and also stored in other canals. *This slide is similar to what is going on today in June of 2017. Wildlife is drowning in the Water Conservation Areas (south of EAA) while the Everglades Agricultural Area is pumped dry to protect agriculture. (just south Lake O) Crazy. (Captiva Conservation 2005.)
ISSUE OF C-44 CANAL BASIN WATER BEING SENT INTO LAKE O RAHTER THAN TO SLR:

” For the period 1980-2016, about 32% of the C-44 Basin runoff was sent to the Lake, while 68% was sent to the St. Lucie River and Estuary. Historically (i.e., before 1923) virtually none of the C-44 Basin runoff went to the St. Lucie River and Estuary: some went to the Lake, some went to the Loxahatchee River and some went north to the St. John’s River. So far in 2017, virtually all of the basin runoff has been sent to the Lake.”

Gary Goforth (http://www.garygoforth.net)

6-28-17 JTL

___________________________________________

ARTICLES ON C-44 INTO LAKE O & BACK-PUMPING INTO LAKE:

Why is C-44 flowing backwards, JTL: https://jacquithurlowlippisch.com/2017/06/13/why-are-c-44-and-s-2-flowing-backwards-into-lake-okeechobee/WPTV Back Pumping Concerns: http://amp.wptv.com/2248571360/lake-okeechobee-back-pumping-concers.html

TCPalm:  Back-pumping into L.O. http://www.tcpalm.com/story/news/local/indian-river-lagoon/health/2017/06/27/south-florida-water-management-district-backpumping-into-lake-o/431280001/

CBS12: http://cbs12.com/news/local/water-managers-begin-back-pumping-to-address-high-water-emergency

Map south of Lake O. showing EAA, STAs, and WCAs. (Map Everglades Foundation, public)

Deadlines for EAA Reservoir and SB10, SLR/IRL

Aerials of A-1/A-2 region of the EAA, JTL/EL 2017
The following is a handout Mark Perry of Florida Oceanographic passed out yesterday at the Rivers Coalition meeting. It is created by John Ullman of the Florida Sierra Club and gives clear presentation on what is necessary for the EAA Reservoir and SB10’s success. I am reprinting here as a resource and reference. Getting the legislation passed for Senate Bil 10 was just the beginning. As we know, for the reservoir to come to fruition we must be diligent over the coming years.
Notice the July 1st, 2017 deadline for the SFWMD to”request that the US Army Corps jointly develop a post-authorization change report for the Central Everglades Planning Project to revise the A-2 parcel element of the project.”
Relationships with the District continue to be strained; a nice phone call or email to Executive Director Peter Antonacci or board member would prove helpful. We must rebuild relationships for future success. We all do have a common goal, clean water for Florida.

http://my.sfwmd.gov/portal/page/portal/xweb%20about%20us/executive%20management

SIERRA CLUB, FLORIDA’S SB10 Blog-by John Ullman
SB10, Important Deadlines:

By July 1, 2017 SFWMD must request that the US Army Corps jointly develop a post-authorization change report for the Central Everglades Planning Project to revise the A-2 parcel element of the project.

By July 31, 2017, SFWMD must contact the lessors and landowners of 3,200 acres of state-owned land and 500 acres of privately-owned land just west of the A-2 parcel. SFWMD must express interest in acquiring this land through purchase, exchange, or terminating leases.

If the US Army Corps agrees to begin developing the post-authorization report, work on the report must begin by August 1, 2017.

SFWMD must report the status of the post-authorization change report to Fla Legislature by January 9, 2018.

SFWMD and Corps must submit the post-authorization change report to Congress by October 1, 2018.*

The House passed the measure with a 99-19 vote; the Senate passed it 33-0.

The Governor signed SB 10 into law on May 9, 2017

Details of SB 10:

• Accelerates the state’s 20-year goal of storing water south of Lake Okeechobee.

• Requires SFWMD to develop a project plan for an Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) Reservoir that provides at least 240,000 acre-feet (about 78 billion gallons) of water storage by utilizing the A-2 parcel (14,000 acres of state-owned land), land swaps, early termination of leases, and land acquisition.

• Provides for at least two-thirds of the water storage capacity of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) Component G.

• Allows the A-1 parcel to remain a Flow Equalization Basin (FEB) as provided for in the Central Everglades Planning Project (CEPP), or to be utilized for the EAA Reservoir if SFWMD can provide for at least 360,000 acre-feet of water storage.

• Requires SFWMD to include increased canal conveyance improvements, if needed, and features to meet water quality standards in the EAA Reservoir project.

• Provides deadlines for submitting the plan to Congress as a post-authorization change report, which will seek approval of the use of the A-2 parcel in a different manner than was authorized in CEPP.

• If the Corps has not approved the post-authorization change report and submitted it to Congress by October 1, 2018 or the post-authorization change report is not approved by Congress by December 31, 2019, SFWMD must request the Corps to develop a project implementation report for the EAA Reservoir Project located somewhere else.

• Prohibits the use of eminent domain to obtain privately held land.

• Provides for termination of the U.S. Sugar option agreement prior to the October 2020 expiration date if the post-authorization change report receives congressional approval or SFWMD certifies to the Board of Trustees of the Internal Improvement Trust Fund, the President of the Senate, and the Speaker of the House that acquisition of the land necessary for the EAA reservoir project has been completed.

• Authorizes the use of Florida Forever bonds in an amount of up to $800 million for the costs of land acquisition, planning and construction of the EAA reservoir project.

• Appropriates $30 million from the Land Acquisition Trust Fund (LATF) to the Everglades Trust Fund, in the 2017-18 fiscal year, for the purposes of acquiring land or negotiating leases to implement or for planning or construction of the Everglades Agricultural Area reservoir project.

• Appropriates $3 million from the LATF to the Everglades Trust Fund in the 2017-18 fiscal year for the development of the CEPP post-authorization change report.

• Amends the LATF distribution to include $64 million of additional funding for the EAA reservoir project.

• Appropriates $30 million from the General Revenue Trust Fund to the Water Protection and Sustainability Program Trust Fund to provide a loan for implementation of Phase I of the C-51 reservoir project.

• Appropriates $1 million from the LATF to the Everglades Trust Fund in the 2017-18 fiscal year for the purpose of negotiating Phase II of the C-51 reservoir and provides the LATF as a potential funding source for the implementation of Phase II of the C-51 reservoir.

• Creates the water storage facility revolving loan fund and requires the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to adopt rules for its implementation.

• Creates the Everglades Restoration Agricultural Community Employment Training Program within the Department of Economic Opportunity (DEO) to provide grants to stimulate and support training and employment programs that seek to re-train and employ displaced agricultural workers.

• Requires SFWMD to give preferential hiring treatment to displaced agricultural workers, consistent with their qualifications and abilities, for construction and operation of the EAA reservoir project.

• Terminates the inmate labor work program on state-owned lands in the EAA.

The post-authorization change report must be approved by Congress by December 1, 2019.*

*If these two deadlines are not met (and no extension is granted), then the SFWMD must request that the Corps initiate the planning for the EAA Reservoir project that will result in a new Project Implementation Report (PIR) and may continue to build CEPP components as planned in the 2014 PIR.

Posted by Jon Ullman, May 2017, Sierra Club blog
Sierra Club Florida website:http://www.sierraclub.org/florida

JTL 6-23-17

WPTV’s “Changing Seas” Features St Lucie River’s Toxic Algae Saga, SLR/IRL

The day before yesterday, I received an email from my mother. It read:

“I was watching TV and it looked like “our” toxic algae is going to be in the Changing Seas program tomorrow night on PBS at 9.”

She was right! So glad she let me know as I may have missed it. If you did, you can view on link below.

CHANGING SEAS
Toxic Algae: Complex Sources and Solutions:

http://video.wpbt2.org/video/3002101897/

There is incredible footage of the 2016 toxic algae event caused primarily by forced discharges by the ACOE and SFWMD from Lake Okeechobee into the estuaries, St Lucie and Caloosahatchee. South Florida locals such as Mary Radabaugh, Dr Edie Widder, Dr Brian LaPointe, Mark Perry, Phil Norman, Dr Larry Brand, Dr Steve Davis, and Col. Jennifer Reynolds are prominently featured. Edie Widder’s political commentary at the end is priceless.

CHANGING SEAS
Toxic Algae: Complex Sources and Solutions.
Aired: 06/21/2017

Water releases from Lake Okeechobee periodically create putrid mats of blue-green algae. Scientists think water pollution is to blame, and if something isn’t done about it there could be irreparable damage to the environment, the local economy and people’s health.

You can Like Changing Seas on Facebook and attend their DIVE IN Summer series on this topic June 28th, 2017. See link:

https://www.facebook.com/changingseas/?hc_ref=PAGES_TIMELINE


Please use link, not arrow to access video again: http://video.wpbt2.org/video/3002101897/

Thank you Changing Seas for covering this important topic!

6-22-17

JTL

Why are C-44 and S-2 flowing backwards into Lake Okeechobee? 

My brother, Todd,  wrote to me on June 8th noting that the C-44 canal was flowing westwards into Lake Okeechobee rather than dumping eastwards into the St Lucie as is standard operating procedure after a big rain…

Yes this canal, as most of the others, can “flow” in either direction, seemly “backwards.”

So how can this happen? This backwards flow?

Dr Gary Goforth says the following:

“Yes this is normal operations; generally when the Lake level is below 14 ft the Corps leaves the locks at S-308 wide open which allows any local runoff to flow into the lake.”

Another way Lake Okeechobee can receive water in an unusual way is if the water is pumped into it–back pumped. This has recently been done from the EAA. Back pumping into Lake O has been outlawed, but it is allowed if communities or farmland would flood.

According to an exchange yesterday on Facebook, with  Audubon’s Dr Paul Grey:

“St Lucie (C-44) backflows are just one of many southern inflows now, S-2 is backpumping, three other southern outlets are flowing backward into the low lake (L-8, S354, S-352) the Caloosahatchee was backflowing but appears equalized today. More water is flowing into the lake from downstream areas than upstream right now. Not the end of the world but not desirable either, it is very polluted water. http://w3.saj.usace.army.mil/h2o/reports/r-oke.html  “

When I asked Dr Grey if this was being done to gather water in the lake as we’ve recently been in a drought, or to keep the farmlands in the  EAA and surrounding areas dry, this was his response:

“Both, they want to fill the lake this summer, and so do I, in concept, but much of this backpumping and flowing is because the farmers have been pumping water so rapdily off their own lands they have made the canals too deep, and risk fooding the communities. And rather than tell the farmers the canal its too deep and they have to modererate their pumping, the SFWMD backpumps/flow it to the lake.”

In any case, when I visited yesterday during my trip to Belle Glade, S-308 was closed at Port Mayaca and no more water was entering Lake O from C-44. I’m not sure about S-2.

The water looks dark and full of sediment. The once beautiful beach is full of gritty rocks. Maybe the lake is healthy in the shallows south, near the islands, but by Port Mayaca it looks terrible. Algae has been reported by S-308 a few weeks ago according to a report from Martin County at the River’s Coalition meeting. But thankfully there is not algae reported in C-44 right now.

We have really made a mess of it. For our rivers and for Lake Okeechobee, the reservoir must be built and we must continue to advocate for sending cleaned water south and re -plumb this outdated system. Forward flow or backwards flow, just say NO.

6-13-17 JTL

____________________________________

Todd Thurlow notes 6-8-17

Jacqui,

Interesting note: if this data is correct, C-44 has poured 10.7 billion gallons (aka 13.82 Stuart Feet) of water into Lake Okeechobee in the last three days. With all the recent “local” runoff into the canal, they have opened S-308, sending the water west to the Lake to help get the low lake level up.

48.5 million gallons passed through S-80 to the St. Lucie on June 5th…

-Todd

C-44 back flow to Lake O, ACOE

Article in Okeechobee News by Katrina Elsken “St Lucie Water Flowing Into the Big O” http://okeechobeenews.net/lake-okeechobee/st-lucie-water-flowing-big-o/

SFWMD: https://www.sfwmd.gov

ACOE Lake O: http://www.saj.usace.army.mil/Missions/Civil-Works/Lake-Okeechobee/

Structures and canals south of LO
Canal and basin map, Martin and St Lucie Co,SLR/IRL. SFWMD
C-44 canal from Stuart to Lake O.
S-308 at Lake O and C-44 canal Port Mayaca

Numerous wood storks and great egrets eating fish in the polluted side canals of C-44:

Video:(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-7IwzHGZIM)

Glimpse From the St Lucie, and its Lost Pine Forests of Yesteryear, SLR/IRL

Historic postcard, St Lucie River looking from “Dudley’s,” today’s Palm City, near Sandhill Cove, across the river to Stuart, undated. Courtesy, Sandra Henderson Thurlow.

In this historic postcard we see many things that today we often do not see: a well dressed man in a hat; women also with lavish hats and donning long dresses; tall grasses along the shoreline; and an extensive pine forest across the St Lucie River…

Martin County, like most of Florida was once a giant forest. Logging companies harvested much of the area starting in the mid 1800s. We can only really guess what it looked like, and only imagine what the world was like for the animals and native peoples that lived under its cover.

Harshberger vegetation map 1913.

The famous Harshberger vegetation map of 1913 gives us an idea of what Martin County would have looked like, noting mostly pine forests of Caribbean and Sand Pine, but other plant communities near the St Lucie River would have included: beach; strand; tropical hammock; mangroves; low hammock; scrub; dry prairie; wet prairie; pine flat woods; swamp and marsh. The United States woodland density map of 1873 shows Florida to be one of the greenest areas of the continent having had the most trees. Wouldn’t that have been something to see!

Woodland density map 1873, William H. Brewer.

We cannot return the forests, but we can choose what plants and trees to put in our yards. The business of landscaping has us in a cycle of turf, fertilizing, pesticides, and often bushes and trees that don’t really “go” here.

One way to help the St Lucie River is to take into our own hands what we plant in our yards. This can take time and that’s part of the fun of it. Creating a Florida Friendly yard using a mixture of native and Florida tolerant plants, less turf, requiring  fewer chemicals and maintenance really does help. What if everyone did it?

When you drive across the bridge, or look across the river, or look at your yard, just for fun, ask yourself: “What would have been here, what would have been naturally beautiful, what would have attracted wildlife one hundred years ago?”….and then if you feel like it–recreate!

A photo from DEP showing a yard along the North Fork of the SLR. In instances like this it is easy to see the negative effects of fertilizer runoff in river from a yard that is mostly turf grass. A better choice would be like the image below. 

John Whiticar SLR/IRL

Florida Native Plant Society: http://www.fnps.org/natives/native-plant-communities

Florida Friendly Yards and Native Plants: http://floridayards.org/fyplants/

Original plant communities of Broward Co, (very similar to Martin Co. St Lucie mentioned):
http://journals.fcla.edu/browardlegacy/article/viewFile/77908/75344

US old forests: https://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/rmap/rmap_nrs4.pdf

John Harshberger:http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/chronob/HARS1869.htm

6-9-17 JTL

Lake Okeechobee Blue-Green Bacterial Blooms in Florida: Lessons From Lake Erie, Prof. Geoff Norris, SLR/IRL

 

Blue-green algae bloom St Lucie River, 2016, JTL

Today I am again honored to feature the writing of Professor Geoff Norris. This most recent work is a tremendous achievement of time, research, and puzzle piecing. Professor Norris’ past shared articles “Blue Green Algal Blooms in the Lakes, Rivers, and Marine Waters of South Florida Surrounding Lake Okeechobee,” and “Sugarcane and Indians” were extremely popular with many of my readers. Professor Norris has a way of communicating complex topics in an easy and interesting way so that everyone can understand and make the  connections. In the 1960s Professor Norris  lived and worked as a petroleum exploration geologist in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Subsequently, he spent 40 years at the University of Toronto teaching and performing research in geology. A  geologist by training, Professor Norris  has a specialized knowledge of fossil algae, their ecology, morphology, and distribution.  He has published hundreds of scientific papers on fossil algae and related topics…I encourage you to contact him by email with any questions at rosalex@interlog.com

Thank you Professor Norris. “Together we will create a “better water future!”

Jacqui

 

IMG_1003

Lake Okeechobee blue-green bacterial blooms in Florida: lessons from Lake Erie

By Geoff Norris, PhD

University of Toronto: http://www.es.utoronto.ca/people/faculty/norris-geof/

rosalex@interlog.com

May 2017

 

Preamble

 

In the following article, I have attempted to summarize some of the voluminous literature on Lake Erie and its problem blue-green blooms, and how this might help to understand similar events in Lake Okeechobee.  I have included URL web addresses for some of the topics, which can be used to access further information.

 

Although the blooms are often referred to as blue-green algae, this is quite inaccurate and I can see no further point in perpetuating this misnomer.  The blooms are largely or entirely composed of Cyanobacteria, or blue-green bacteria as I have chosen to call them for this article.  This is not just for precision and to point up their lack of a nucleus and other organelles in each cell, but serves to underline how these organisms earn a living and perpetuate themselves that is quite different compared to nucleated organisms, the latter including algae, fungi, all green plants, and all animals.  This difference is really important.

 

The topic is vast and my review barely scratches the surface – it’s not meant to, because I am not an expert and am still trying to understand the vast complexity of blue-green bacterial bloom formation.  I have tried to unravel and clarify some of the science and scientific investigations that have been important for me, and have used these as examples of the work that is going on or has led to current advances.  For every paper I have cited, however, there could be tens or hundreds more that haven’t been consulted or mentioned.  I apologize in advance to those many talented scientists that I haven’t mentioned or that I am simply unaware of.

 

 

Steel Town

 

I used to live in Hamilton, Ontario, a prosperous city with thriving iron and steel mills, other manufacturing industries, an excellent university and a great football team, a sort of Pittsburg of the North. It sits on the shores of Lake Ontario on a sliver of land – the Niagara Peninsula – that separates Lake Erie from Lake Ontario.  In the early summer after the ice had melted, many of the locals in the mid-1900s would take advantage of the beaches along Lake Ontario to sun themselves and wait until the water was warm enough to swim in.  However, you could get a head start on summer by taking a short drive south (less than an hour) to the beaches along Lake Erie where the water was warmer earlier in the summer, and resorts and tourism thrived.  Fish were abundant and the lake was very productive for commercial fishing and equally attractive for sport fishing. The beaches were superb for tourism and sun lovers.  Lake Erie is large but shallow (average depth about 60ft) and so a baby on a Great Lakes scale from a volumetric point of view (most of the Great Lakes are hundreds of feet deep, the deepest being Superior at more than 1300 ft maximum depth).  However, Lake Erie’s smaller volume and shallow waters helped it to warm up quickly in the spring and summer.

 

The Dead Sea of North America

 

Then something happened to Lake Erie, starting in the 1960s.  The water of Lake Erie became murky and discolored, mass fish kills led to piles of rotting marine life polluting the beaches, the tourists and anglers and sun worshippers stayed away in droves, the resorts closed down, the commercial fisheries were badly hit, and the economy suffered enormously.  Algae were blamed but no one was quite sure why they had become so abundant – “eutrophication” was the buzzword of the time.  Lake Erie was declared “dead”, which was quite inaccurate since it was swarming with life, but the wrong sort of life.  The culprits polluting the environment were a mixture of true green algae (such as Cladophora) and so-called “blue green algae” (such as Microcystis and Aphanizomenon), which in truth are types of bacteria using chlorophyll and other pigments that allow them to live in sunlight (their technical name is Cyanobacteria –called blue-green bacteria in this article), and this is discussed in more detail in my previous blog: https://jacquithurlowlippisch.com/tag/dr-geoffrey-norris/).  The plight of the Dead Sea of North America (as Lake Erie became known) was so notorious that one of Dr Seuss’s books for children – The Lorax (1971) – made reference to it in his famous style of doggerel:

 

You’re glumping the pond where the Humming-Fish hummed!

No more can they hum, for their gills are gummed.

So I’m sending them off. Oh, their future is dreary.

They’ll walk on their fins and get woefully weary

In search of some water that isn’t so smeary.

I hear things are just as bad up in Lake Erie.

 

The Fix

 

Very fortunately the mystery of Lake Erie’s “death” was soon solved, thanks to a treaty between the U.S. and Canada dating back to the early 1900s that acknowledged the need to maintain water quality in the Great Lakes’ waters bordering the two countries.
By the middle of the 20th century this had morphed into the International Joint Commission for the Great Lakes. These international efforts were underpinned by government and university-based research in both the U.S. and Canada, which identified phosphorus entering the waters as a major contributor, particularly from agricultural fertilizers on the one hand and from domestic laundry detergents on the other. In 1972 the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (GLQWA) was signed between the United States and Canada, by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau for Canada and President Richard Nixon for the United States.  They loathed one another personally, but they knew what was the right thing to do for their countries.

Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and President Richard Nixon signing the Agreement.

 

The Agreement emphasized the reduction of phosphorous entering lakes Erie and Ontario, and, in 1977, maximum levels for phosphorous were added to the Agreement. Also, phosphorus in laundry detergents was finally drastically reduced or banned. Coupled with the U.S. and Canadian Clean Water acts, the International Joint Commission did much to reduce the phosphorus levels in Lake Erie.


International Joint Commission (IJC): More than a century of cooperation protecting shared waters.  Canada and the United States each appoint three of the six IJC Commissioners, including one chair from each country. The two chairs serve concurrently.  The Commissioners are appointed by the highest level of government in each country, but once appointed they do not represent the national governments; they operate at arm’s length.  The Commissioners traditionally work by consensus to find solutions that are in the best interest of both countries. The Commissioners are supported by U.S. and Canadian Section offices in Washington, D.C. and Ottawa, Ontario.”

 

So everyone breathed a sigh of relief, phosphorus levels went down, farmers applied fertilizers to their fields differently, consumers chose phosphorus-free detergents, municipalities improved their storm water and sewage treatment facilities, the fish and other wildlife came back to Lake Erie, and Dr Seuss was persuaded to remove the last line in his poem.  Further details can be found in a report by the National Wildlife Federation:

 

https://www.nwf.org/~/media/PDFs/Regional/Great-Lakes/GreatLakes-Feast-and-Famine-Nutrient-Report.ashx

 

The Monster Returns

 

For almost 20 years, Lake Erie was not plagued by the blue-green bacteria problem, but other problems did emerge such as exotic zebra mussels that interfered with the distribution of elements important in nutrition, but they seemed at the time to be unrelated to bacterial infestations.  Then starting in the mid-1990s, the blue-greens reappeared and became progressively worse leading to super-gigantic blooms that choked the western end of Lake Erie with green muck inches thick and hundred of square miles in extent.  Dead zones – biological black holes – reappeared in the Lake as the rotting organic matter sucked the oxygen out of the water, promising certain death to animals that ventured in.

 

http://www.ijc.org/php/publications/html/modsum/fitzpatrick.html

 

In the summer of 2011 the mother of all blue-green bacterial blooms exploded in Lake Erie, the bloom at its peak being more than 1900 square miles in extent.  That is more than 50% greater than the entire state of Rhode Island, or 35% larger than Long Island, or more than six times larger than all of New York City’s five boroughs.  This super-giant bloom had an estimated weight of 40,000 metric tons dry weight. The wet weights of algae and blue-green bacteria are generally at least 10 times the dry weight. So, this supergiant bloom had at least half a billion tons of blue-green bacteria living within it – a true monster.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.4319/lo.1963.8.2.0309/asset/lno1963820309.pdf?v=1&t=j1xgd80g&s=6fdbe97550dee9784d101dc1cfb30256a4b0b278

 

MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) satellite Image of Lake Erie on September 3, 2011, overlaid over map of Lake Erie tributaries. This image shows the bloom (in green) about 6 weeks after its initiation in the western basin.  From Michalak et al, 2013.

 

These blooms had a devastating effect on the areas flanking the western end of Lake Erie – Ohio, Michigan, and Ontario – with large agricultural areas and several major cities and industrial towns.  Toxins from the blue-green bacteria polluted the drinking water supplies of large cities, and potable water had to be trucked in for the residents.

 

The “greening” of Lake Erie has been documented by Prof. Tom Bridgeman of the University of Toledo in a presentation:

 

https://www.utoledo.edu/law/academics/ligl/pdf/2013

 

Prof. Tom Bridgman

 

In his presentation Prof. Bridgman showed how increasing phosphorus in the lake water favored the blue-green bacteria and shut out the normal tiny floating plants (true algae), a situation that had culminated in the American Dead Sea catastrophe of the 1960s.  The international agreement on phosphorus reduction in the Great Lakes was a huge success story for Lake Erie, but by the mid 1990s algal biomass was beginning to increase again (eutrophication was returning), and by the early 2000s blue green bacteria such as Microcystis were increasing ten-fold, as the reactive phosphorus in the lake waters increased beyond levels recorded in the 1970s.

 

What the heck was going on here?  Everyone had played their part in reducing phosphorus run-off from agricultural lands, and the municipalities and citizens had cleaned up their act.  So where was the phosphorus coming from?  Well now the plot thickens.

 

Farming and Phosphorus

 

This time, the main problems are thought to be ones that governments have much less direct control over, according to a file posted by Emily Chung of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News (2014).

 

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/lake-erie-s-algae-explosion-blamed-on-farmers-1.2729327

 

To some extent, they include the application of fertilizers to lawns and golf courses, growing expanses of pavement in urban areas that cause water to drain more quickly into waterways without being filtered by vegetation, and invasive zebra mussels that release extra nutrients into the water as they feed. But those aren’t thought to be the biggest cause.

 

“We think farming is the major culprit behind the current levels of phosphorus that’s in runoff and the phosphorus loads that are getting dumped into the western basin of Lake Erie,” said Dr. Glenn Benoy (senior water quality specialist and science adviser with the International Joint Commission in Ottawa).

 

Dr Glenn Benoy

 

So why is this?  Well, there are several things going on.  Firstly, corn production is at an all time high because of the push to increase alcohol biofuel production, and soybeans are being produced in gigantic quantities for use as animal feed, oil and protein for human consumption, plastics and biodiesel.  Secondly, the introduction of no-till farming practice in the U.S. has led to increased run-off of fertilizer.  Thirdly, there’s just not enough infrastructure to deliver in the spring the huge amounts of fertilizer that are required by the corn farmers.  Prof. Ivan O’Halloran of Guelph University, Ontario and a specialist in soil fertility and nutrient use commented that the demand by corn farmers is such that there are simply not enough rail cars to satisfy the need.  So companies offer discounts to farmers who are willing to apply fertilizer in the fall, which in turn leads to enhanced run-off of phosphorus during the winter storms.

Prof. Ivan O’Halloran

 

No-till Farming and Glyphosate

 

And then there is the matter of no-till farming. No-till farming (also called zero tillage or direct drilling) is a way of growing crops or pasture from year to year without disturbing the soil through tillage, and in current practice depends on the use of powerful herbicides such as glyphosate (Monsanto’s Roundup brand being the most popular formulation).  Application of glyphosate kills weeds and other vegetation in preparation of the seedbed.  Later in the year, another application of the herbicide is used to reduce weeds that might be harming the crop. However, this is only possible if the farmers use genetically modified seeds that are resistant to glyphosate – often referred to as Roundup Ready seeds.  In 2014 in the U.S. 98% of soybeans and more than half of corn was Roundup Ready.  Advocates of Roundup point out that glyphosate is a compound derived from phosphonic acid in which the phosphorus is strongly bonded to carbon and therefore is not available to plants, unlike fertilizer which contains phosphates (not phosphonates) which has phosphorus bonded less strongly to oxygen, and is therefore more readily available for uptake by plants (often referred to by the acronym DRP – dissolved reactive phosphorus).

 

https://www.no-tillfarmer.com/articles/5793-scientists-glyphosate-contributes-to-phosphorus-runoff-in-lake-erie?v=preview

 

http://sustainablepulse.com/2016/07/04/glyphosate-herbicides-cause-tragic-phosphorus-poisoning-of-lake-erie/#.V4ZaaleufYI

 

Prof. Chris Spiese is a chemist at Ohio Northern University and he decided to test the contribution that glyphosate might make to the amount of dissolved reactive phosphorus running off of cultivated fields.  He found that glyphosate acts on the soil to allow the phosphorus bonded to the soil (either being naturally present or due to fertilizer use) to be released by the chemical process known as desorption.  He also found that soils richer in both iron oxides and iron hydroxides tend to release by desorption more phosphorus, as do soils that are more acidic.  Overall, he calculated that glyphosate is responsible for releasing 20-25% of the dissolved reactive phosphorus in the Maumee watershed, a river discharging into the western end of Lake Erie.  Prof. Spiese calculated that for every acre of Roundup Ready soybeans, one-third of a pound of phosphorus comes down the Maumee River.  In 2010, according to the Ohio Soybean Council, 4.6 million acres were planted in soybeans, of which about 2 million acres of soybean fields drain into Lake Erie.

 

http://www.circleofblue.org/cpx/great-lakes-algae/infographics-effect-of-northern-ohios-cropland-and-land-use-on-maumee-river-and-lake-erie/

Prof. Chris Spiese

 

If Prof. Spiese’s calculation for the Maumee watershed hold true for all the soybean acreage in Ohio draining into Lake Erie, this would suggest that each year hundreds of tons of dissolved reactive phosphorus are entering the Lake from this source alone.  And then there are the other states and provinces bordering Lake Erie that are also involved in soybean production:  Ontario 2 million acres; Michigan 1.5 million acres; NW New York, 1/3 million acres; Pennsylvania 1/2 million acres.  Of course, not all these agricultural lands drain into Lake Erie but these numbers give some idea of potential dissolved reactive phosphorus input related to soybean production alone.

 

The Monster Revisited

 

The super-giant blue-green bacterial bloom of 2011 in Lake Erie required a concerted response from the scientific community to understand just why this had happened.  There was no doubt in scientists’ minds that dissolved reactive phosphorus as run-off from agricultural land was a major factor.  But why should a super-giant bloom happen in 2011 and not in 2012 when the same agricultural land and its phosphorus run-off were still flanking the Lake and continued to be a constant factor?  Something else was involved.  So an elite team of scientists from universities, government laboratories, and industrial laboratories got together to investigate, headed up by Prof. Anna Michalak of Stanford University.

Prof. Anna Michalak

 

In 2013 this team of 29 scientists came up with their report, which was published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3631662/

 

The team concluded that long-term trends in agricultural practices (e.g. no-till farming) plus increased acreage under intense cultivation (notably soybeans and corn) led to a major pulse of phosphorus into Lake Erie during some unusually intense spring rainstorms in 2011.  Then in the late spring and summer unusually quiet but warm weather conditions provided just the right conditions to seed, incubate and grow the bloom in the waters of Lake Erie.  The team stated  If a scientifically guided management plan to mitigate these impacts is not implemented, we can therefore expect this [super-giant blue-green bacterial] bloom to be a harbinger of future blooms in Lake Erie.” – because unusual weather events, lower wind speeds, warmer waters, and higher rainfalls are becoming more common and can be expected in the future.

 

Glyphosate and Blue Green Bacteria

 

Recent work by scientists at Bowling Green State University has reported the presence of glyphosate in Lake Erie.  It is evidently washing out of the no-till crop fields, and reaches a maximum in the summer months.  Also it has been found in water treatment plants, peaking in the summer months.  Prof. McKay and his colleagues raised the possibility in 2010 that the presence of glyphosate in Lake Erie together with phosphates from fertilizers tend to stimulate the growth of blue-green bacteria, whereas phosphates alone do not do this but favor diatoms, a normal algal component of Lake Erie.  It seems that blue-green bacteria can utilize the phosphorus in the glyphosate, which was believed to be otherwise not normally bio-available.  Many questions remain to be answered but the intense use of glyphosate in the area around Lake Erie demands rapid action in the very near future to establish just how much glyphosate is involved in blue-green bacterial blooms.

 

http://www.lemn.org/LEMN2010_files/Presentations/McKay_LEMN__April2010_Phosphonate_26April.pdf

Prof. Robert McKay

 

An even more disturbing piece of microbiological and genetic research was done by Prof. Victoria López-Rodas in Madrid together with other Spanish colleagues in 2007.  They studied Microcystis, one of the bad boys of the blue-green bacteria family.  They found that rare mutations during growth and division of cells could clone a glyphosate-resistant strain that could survive in glyphosate polluted waters.  In other words, Microcystis has the potential to develop into a “superbug” unaffected by glyphosate.  The odds of a mutation like this occurring were calculated to be a few times in 10 million by Prof. Lopez-Rodas’ team.  That’s better than the odds for winning the Jackpot in the Florida Power Ball Lottery (1 in 292 million), but still not great.  If you bought hundreds of millions of ticket in the lottery, you would have a good chance of winning at least once, perhaps several times (but at $2 a ticket you financial advisor might have some things to say to you about your investment strategy).  However, given a little phosphorus and nitrogen, Microcystis can keep on dividing trillions and trillions of time to form blooms in warm water.  With such astronomical numbers, a rare mutation becomes a virtual certainty at some point during cloning, and in the presence of an antibiotic such as glyphosate, a superbug is born.

Prof. Victoria Lopez-Rodas

 

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10682-006-9134-8

 

 

The Nitrogen Mystery

 

So far the emphasis has been on phosphorus and how it is important in blue-green bacterial bloom formation.  But nitrogen is also very important as a nutritional component for blue-greens and indeed for all life.  Green plants need nitrogen to synthesize proteins and other important components in their cells.  Although nitrogen is abundant in the atmosphere, it is an inert gas and simply unavailable as a nutrient for many green plants.  It needs to be combined with hydrogen (as an ammonia compound) or with oxygen (as a nitrate compound) to be absorbed by the plant.  These nitrogen compounds may be naturally occurring in soil, but in agricultural land they need to be added frequently as fertilizer for crops to thrive.

 

Blue-green bacteria have an advantage over green algae and other green plants because some blue-greens have the ability to synthesize nitrogen compounds directly from gaseous nitrogen – they are said to be able to “fix” the nitrogen.  But some other blue-green bacteria are unable to fix the nitrogen and have to depend on another source.  Microcystis is a case in point (the blue-green bacteria that are often dominant in the giant blooms in Lake Erie and Lake Okeechobee).  Microcystis is highly dependant on a source of nitrogen to thrive.  This can of course be provided by run-off from crop fertilizer, but it does not always explain the fluctuations of this and other blue-green bacteria that have or do not have nitrogen fixation ability in Lake Erie, in spite of the fact that the experts all agree that phosphorus – not nitrogen – is the principal limiting factor.

 

Lucas Beversdorf and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin decided in 2010 to try and solve the problem and improve predictability of toxic blue-green episodes in a beautifully designed and detailed study of Lake Mendota, Wisconsin a much smaller lake (15 square miles) than Lake Erie but about the same depth and with similar temperate seasonal weather patterns.

Dr. Lucas Beversdorf

 

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0056103

 

They found that Microcystis (blue-green non-nitrogen fixer) rode on the back of Aphanizomenon  (blue-green nitrogen fixer) in a nutritional sense.  Without the nitrogen fixer doing its work first in the spring, Microcystis as a non-nitrogen fixer could not attain dominance and pollute the water with toxic microcystin in the summer.  This could be relevant to understanding how the blooms that occurred in the mid-20th century in Lake Erie came about, both Microcystis and Aphanizomenon being important contributors to large blue-green blooms at that time.  It could also be important in predicting when blooms can be expected.

 

Prof. Karl Havens, a biologist at the University of Florida (and formerly of the South Florida Water Management District) has discussed the implications of nitrogen and phosphorus as nutrients for blue-green bacteria in Lake Okeechobee, and the need to reduce both given the physical and biological complexities in a shallow lake.

 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/216768923_Controlling_Eutrophication_Nitrogen_and_Phosphorus

 

Prof. Karl Havens

 

It has been known for some time that non-nitrogen fixing bacteria are highly competitive when it comes to ammonium compounds in freshwater lakes, possibly explaining why Microcystis and similar blue-green bacteria do achieve dominance in the blue-green blooms when in proximity to agricultural run-off.

 

http://ci.nii.ac.jp/naid/10011533602/

 

Blue-greens from Space

 

Researchers are looking for ways to monitor assess and predict algal blooms of all types.  This can be done by sampling the lake waters and analyzing them for various organisms and chemical compounds, such as Dr Beversdorf did for his detailed study of Lake Mendota.  However, in very large lakes such as Lake Erie the shear size of the lake makes rapid response to a growing giant algal bloom impossible.

 

Prof. Joseph Ortiz of Kent State University, Ohio has been actively involved in developing new ways to gather information on giant blue-green bacterial blooms using an instrument on board the International Space Station.  From space it can image all of Lake Erie in two days – remember Lake Erie is about 9,900 square miles (241 miles long, 57 miles wide).  He uses a technique called hyperspectral visible derivative spectroscopy, quite a mouthful but very important.  The hyperspectral imager works in orbit about 220 miles above the Earth’s surface and transmit the results to Dr Ortiz who uses sophisticated analytical methods to identify various types of algae and bacteria in the lake water.

Prof. Joseph Ortiz

 

https://www.kent.edu/research/joseph-ortiz

 

https://hyspiri.jpl.nasa.gov/downloads/2014_Workshop/day3/1_Ortiz_2014_HyspIRI_JPL_Science_Team_talk.pdf

 

This and related techniques are now being used to forecast blue-green bacterial blooms, in cooperative ventures between NASA and NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration).  For example this was their forecast summary for 2014:

 

“This year’s forecast is for a western basin Lake Erie cyanobacteria bloom of 22,000 metric tons dry weight (MT), with a 95% predictive interval of 11,000 to 33,000 MT. The bloom size over the last decade (2004-2013) has averaged 14,000 MT, such that this year’s bloom will likely be above average. However, the 2014 bloom is expected to be less than the record bloom of 40,000 MT, which occurred in 2011.”

 

https://www.glerl.noaa.gov/res/HABs_and_Hypoxia/docs/LakeErieBloomForecastRelease071514.pdf

 

 

In August of 2014 the City of Toledo shut down its water supply because of contamination by blue-green bacterial toxins (microcystin), which made it undrinkable for 400,000 residents, confirming the astonishing power of this predictive method.

 

A Florida Mismanagement Plan for Niagara Falls

 

Just imagine if the same planning “logic” had been applied to Lake Erie as has happened with Lake Okeechobee.  In the case of Lake Okeechobee, agricultural interests took over an Everglades river and associated sawgrass wetlands to drain them for use as sugar plantations.  To do this the ancient course of an Everglades river was disrupted by damming its 25-mile wide outflow from Lake Okeechobee, upstream from the Everglades Agricultural Area.  In so doing the lake level rose because it had no other natural outlet. Therefore higher shoreline dike construction was needed (the Herbert Hoover Dike) to impound the water to prevent flooding of the adjacent land.  All this destroyed a large part of the Everglades, a natural wonder of the world designated an International Biosphere Reserve and a World Heritage Site by UNESCO and a Wetland of International Importance. The “river of grass” in the Everglades became starved for water.

Everglades River of Grass

Meanwhile, the Kissimmee River feeding into Lake Okeechobee and draining another agricultural area was straightened and canalized to remove those annoying meanders that characterize river systems as they approach local base level (the lowest point to which a river can flow).  The straightened channels thus allowed rapid fertilizer run-off from the fields, preventing filtering and bio-cleansing in the natural wetland vegetation of the flood plain meanders that would otherwise exist, further contributing to heavy phosphorus loading in Lake Okeechobee and the consequent blue-green bacterial blooms. The straightened channels also contributed voluminous extra water that the lake could not handle.  Therefore, the lake managers and flood controllers (the Army Corps of Engineers) directed the overflow waters down a number of canals with outlets to the highly populated Atlantic and Gulf coastlines and the sea, the overflow water being heavily polluted with blue-green bacteria from the giant blooms that grew in the lake.

 

So let’s work this through for our imaginary Niagara Gorge Agricultural Area, a 7-mile stretch that would be ideal land for growing grapes and other fruits in a valley just below Niagara Falls.  Once drained, the imaginary agricultural area would eventually develop lime-rich soils, which would be perfect for high quality wine grapes, and would be similar to the soils in the adjacent Niagara Wine Country.  The fruit would be sheltered from the worst of the Canadian winter that might otherwise be unfavorable for growing and ripening the grapes.  There would be one big problem:  there is too much water in the Niagara Gorge, which transports the Great Lakes waters through the Niagara River into Lake Ontario.

 

So, the imaginary managers deemed that a dam would be necessary across the Niagara River upstream from Niagara Falls to divert the water elsewhere, and help to drain the Gorge.  They knew this would be entirely possible because the Army Corps of Engineers had dammed the Niagara River once before to make repairs to the Falls, back in 1969.  Of course, the magnificent Niagara Falls, a real wonder of the world, would cease to exist.  Meanwhile, the Lake Erie water level would start to rise and bigger and better dikes would be needed, particularly around population centers such as Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, and Detroit, to prevent flooding.  This in turn would raise the base level of the inflowing rivers and they would back up and tend to flood more frequently.  The imaginary managers decided to straighten the meander channels of the rivers to allow quicker drainage, but this in turn sent a high discharge of agricultural phosphorus run-off into the Lake.  The higher loading of phosphorus triggered gigantic blue-green bacterial blooms.

 

Clearly an outlet would be needed for the imaginary re-engineered Lake Erie high-level water, so the imaginary lake managers decided to discharge the lake water somewhere else.  Very fortunately, an older structure – the Erie Canal – still existed and would be ideally suited for modification to act as a spillway or overflow channel.  The Erie Canal in turn would channel the water from Niagara into the Hudson River and out into the Atlantic Ocean near New York City.  Unfortunately the voluminous discharge of polluted freshwater from the Lake would do two things.  First, the blue green bacteria would thrive as the discharge water slowed and became semi-stagnant in the estuaries and coastal regions around Manhattan during the summer.  Secondly, the marine wildlife would be severely impacted due to the drastic reduction in salinities by mixing with freshwater. This would lead to the mass death of marine life, together with animals and plants that thrive in marginal marine and brackish environments such as oysters and clams.  Millions of New Yorkers and those in adjacent areas would become enraged because the grape and fruit growers in the Niagara Gorge Agricultural Area have caused all this in the first place, due to their insistence on the change of land usage.  Meanwhile, the farmers in the newly established Niagara Gorge Agricultural Area are thriving and unaffected by these changes, and blame the towns and cities for inadequate sewage treatment and leaky septic tanks.

 

Of course, all this is nonsense and absurd – a figment of my imagination. It wouldn’t happen in real life, would it?  No one could be that inept or uncaring – or could they?

 

The chances of such a catastrophe happening in real life are very slim in the Niagara region.  Any move by a special interest group planning to monopolize a Great Lakes’ resource would come under the immediate scrutiny the International Joint Commission.  In all likelihood they would jump on such a rapacious scheme like a ton of bricks and it would never see the light of day.

 

It’s a great pity that the people of Florida don’t have an equivalent body with overarching responsibility for maintaining the quality of Florida waters for all Floridians.  Unfortunately, sensible planning initiatives over the decades have been circumvented, and most state politicians have been incapable or reluctant to fund policies directed towards protecting Florida’s water resources.  It is a dismal story of failure to protect Florida’s natural resources, and continues to be fueled by campaign contributions from Big Sugar to Tallahassee.  The more-than-century-long story has been insightfully summarized recently by Jaclyn Blair, a law student at Florida Coastal Law School, Jacksonville, graduating this year (2017) as Juris Doctor.  It is recommended reading for anyone wanting to understand the various parts played by corporate interests, citizens concerns, politicians, policies, legalities, and constitutional amendments regarding the destruction of Florida’s natural resources.

 

https://litigation-essentials.lexisnexis.com/webcd/app?action=DocumentDisplay&crawlid=1&doctype=cite&docid=18+Fl.+Coastal+L.+Rev.+89&srctype=smi&srcid=3B15&key=fe52d3a01a3a36e7263670a16a26ea3a

 

https://jacquithurlowlippisch.com/2017/05/02/florida-coastal-law-reviews-sugar-politics-and-the-destruction-of-floridas-natural-resources-by-jaclyn-blair/

 

Jaclyn Blair (Candidate 2017, Juris Doctor)

 

Lake Okeechobee – Big Water, Big Trouble

 

I didn’t think up this sub-header, but thanks to PBS for producing a video of that name.  In 2007 PBS published this synopsis of their program:

 

“During the past 125 years, a series of well-intentioned decisions, actions and policies have turned what should have been one of Florida’s greatest natural treasures into an environmental villain. Six thousand years later after if was formed, residents and agencies across the state are now raising the questions: Is it too late for Lake O?”

 

In 2017 the question is still valid.

 

Let’s start with the Manager of Lake Okeechobee, the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD), which describes itself as follows in its mission statement:

 

“OUR MISSION: To manage and protect water resources of the region by balancing and improving flood control, water supply, water quality and natural systems.

The South Florida Water Management District is a regional governmental agency that manages the water resources in the southern half of the state, covering 16 counties from Orlando to the Florida Keys and serving a population of 8.1 million residents. It is the oldest and largest of the state’s five water management districts. Created in 1949, the agency is responsible for managing and protecting water resources of South Florida by balancing and improving flood control, water supply, water quality and natural systems.

A key initiative is restoration of the Everglades – the largest environmental restoration project in the nation’s history. The District is also working to improve the Kissimmee River and its floodplain, Lake Okeechobee and South Florida’s coastal estuaries.”

 

 

Now, let’s take a look at Lake Okeechobee’s basic statistics.  It is 730 square miles in area (about 36×29 miles in longest dimensions), very shallow with an average depth of about 9 feet, varies from about 12 ft to 18 ft above sea level, and has a total volume of water of about 1 cubic mile (for comparison, Lake Erie is more than 100 times greater in volume but only about 13 times larger in water surface area).  Lake Okeechobee is the largest lake in the contiguous United States, outside the Great Lakes.

 

Until about 1930, the lake had a natural outflow about 25 miles wide on its south side allowing water to enter the Everglades system.  From about 1930 to 1960 a dirt dam was progressively built, 143 miles in length, and extended all around the Lake as the Herbert Hoover Dike.  This converted Lake Okeechobee from a dynamic system of seasonal inflow and outflow into a semi-stagnant reservoir, with emergency releases of overflow water into canals discharging east and west into the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico, along heavily populated coastal areas.

 

Muddy Waters

 

SFWMD has scientists and engineers working on various aspects of water quality in south Florida, including Lake Okeechobee.  For more than half a century, the Lake Managers have been collecting information on water quality such as water chemistry, amounts of phosphorus and nitrogen, temperature, turbidity, and so on.  That, of course, is their job as a management agency, and each year they and their contractors collect more than a quarter million samples for analysis, many from Lake Okeechobee.  In addition, NOAA has a weather station on the southern rim of the lake and these meteorological data can be integrated with the Managers’ observations on lake water.  This is really important information.  However, their attention to details of biological data seems to be less precise. Their definitions of bloom formation is based, generally, on the amount of a particular type of chlorophyll extracted from water samples, rather than information on the number and concentration of particular types of bacteria or algae.  Nevertheless their information is important, and the Lake Manager’s scientific staff have produced many significant reports analyzing these data to try to explain why bacterial blooms form in the waters of Lake Okeechobee.

 

 

Of first rank importance was the assessment by the Lake Manager’s scientists that Lake Okeechobee was eutrophicating, that is becoming enriched in dissolved nutrients (such as phosphates) that stimulate the growth of aquatic plant life usually resulting in the depletion of dissolved oxygen.

.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07438148809354817

 

Another report by the Lake Manager’s scientists documented the continuing increase and doubling of total phosphorus in the Lake between 1973 and 1984.  Fluctuating lake levels and/or resuspension of soft bottom muds my have been involved in the increase.  However other studies drew attention to the burgeoning intensive dairy and beef cattle industries to the north, starting in the 1950s, providing nutrients from agricultural run-off flowing down the Kissimmee River into Lake Okeechobee, together with nutrients entering the Lake system from the sugar cane industry to the south of the Lake, often by back-pumping.

 

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07438149509354200?src=recsys

 

Other scientists employed by the Lake Manager attempted calculations to balance the amount of phosphorus flowing from the Kissimmee River into the Lake from the cattle farms to the north, compared with the amount being discharged principally through the St Lucie and Caloosahatchee Canals to the east and west.  Their numbers suggested that between 1973 and 2002, each year on average almost 300 tons of phosphorus ended up sinking to the bottom of the Lake.  In the early 2000s the situation had reached crisis proportions because the bottom sediments in the Lake had become thoroughly saturated with phosphorus.  Any further phosphorus would not have bonded firmly to the bottom sediments but would be available in the lake water for biological activity.  In other words, eutrophication was predicted to become much worse, which meant more organisms growing in the lake waters.

 

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07438140509354423?src=recsys

 

Other studies by the Lake Manager’s scientists looked at meteorological information from NOAA and discerned a complex inter-relationship between wind speed, rainfall, inflow from the Kissimmee River, and lake levels, apparently related to “algal” (i.e. bacterial) bloom formation (that is as judged by the amount of chlorophyll extracted from water samples).  They also noted a steady increase in lake levels between 1972 and 1978.  The maximum amount of algal/bacterial material occurred between May and September in calm summer months when the water temperature typically reaches into the mid-80s.

 

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07438149009354699

 

So the Lake Manager’s scientists had come up with some interesting possibilities as to what conditions promote blue-green bacterial bloom formation, but not everything matched and not everyone agreed.  This was a real tough nut to crack.  Something seemed to be missing in the puzzle.  But some scientists were concerned enough to state in 2009 that the [Lake Okeechobee] ecosystem is at risk for continued and perhaps worsened eutrophication symptoms under current P [phosphorus] loading conditions.”

 

Descending the Murky Depths

 

In 1994 Dr. P. Moore, a soil science researcher attached to the University of Arkansas and Prof. K.R. Reddy of the University of Florida came up with a new idea.  It might not be just the lake water that was involved in bloom formation, but the sediments on the bottom of the lake might be implicated in promoting higher phosphorus levels, and particularly the extent of acidity and oxidation or reduction near the sediment-water interface.  They arranged for scuba divers to swim down to the lake bottom with special plastic tubes to be pushed into the mud.  The divers brought back several cores of the mud for analysis in the laboratory.  What they found was that phosphorus can be released from the lake muds when the water mixing with the mud is reducing (i.e. little or no oxygen) and/or acidic, and particularly if iron oxides and iron hydroxides are also present.  This is important in a shallow lake where wind can cause the water column to be mixed, bringing oxygen down to greater depths, which assists in retaining phosphorus in sediments.  However, in the case of Lake Okeechobee, winds in the calm summer months tend to be minimal, and oxygen concentrations diminish at the lake bottom.  Therefore, the reducing conditions help to release phosphorus in the water, just as the water temperatures increase optimally to 75-80 degrees F favoring the growth of bacteria.

Prof. Ramesh Reddy

 

Glyphosate in Lake Okeechobee

 

It’s interesting that Dr. Moore’s and Prof. Reddy’s observations about phosphorus release being favored by acid conditions and iron oxides/hydroxides parallels Prof. Spiese’s work on glyphosate in Ohio, which also implicates acidity and iron oxides and hydroxides in the release of phosphorus from cultivated fields and the growth of blue-green bacterial blooms in lakes.  Maybe something similar is happening in Lake Okeechobee and surrounding cultivated land.

 

Well, is glyphosate really present in Lake Okeechobee?  I searched the Lake Manager’s website and noted that as early as 2000 glyphosate was being used to exterminate several thousand acres of cattails in and around the lake by aerial spraying.

 

https://www.sfwmd.gov/sites/default/files/documents/lakeoprimaryexoticcontrolspecies.pdf

 

In addition, the agricultural areas around Lake Okeechobee and in the Kissimmee River watershed are awash with glyphosate, and the farmers appear to have been enthusiastic users since the early 1990s according to the U.S. Geological Survey, whose maps are reproduced below (one for 1992 and another for 2014, but there are others for the in between years).

https://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/pnsp/usage/maps/show_map.php?year=2013&map=GLYPHOSATE&hilo=L&disp=Glyphosate

But the strongest evidence of all for recent years comes from the website of the US Army Corps of Engineers.  They head up the Lake Okeechobee Aquatic Plant Management Interagency Task Force, which has this mission statement:

 

The Corps of Engineers shall chair, and actively solicit participation in the Lake Okeechobee Aquatic Plant Management Interagency Task Force. The Task Force members will represent State of Florida agencies (including the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the South Florida Water Management District), state Universities, the Corps of Engineers, and other Federal agencies. The Task Force will serve in an advisory capacity, providing multi-disciplinary technical and scientific data from which the Corps’ aquatic plant management strategy, methodology, and research planning and operational efforts will evolve. The focus of the aquatic plant effort will be to benefit the overall ecological health of Lake Okeechobee.

 

http://www.floridainvasives.org/okeechobee/

 

http://www.saj.usace.army.mil/Missions/Environmental/Invasive-Species/Aquatic-Plant-Control-Program/

 

So now it seems that there are two lake managers: The US army Corps of Engineers on the one hand, and the South Florida Water Management District on the other.  The Army Corps of Engineers, as well as having absolute authority to open the floodgates for Lake Okeechobee whenever it deems this necessary, has also now got control of the program to exterminate various aquatic plant species by use of powerful herbicides.  Is this a matter of too many chiefs and not enough Indians?  The Mission of the Army Corps of Engineers is clear: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineer’s mission is to provide vital public engineering services in peace and war to strengthen our Nation’s security, energize the economy, and reduce risks from disasters.  Their Vision is equally clear “Engineering solutions for our Nation’s toughest challenges.”  Their Motto is clear “Building Strong”.  The potential conflict between the two Managers (ACE on the one hand, SFWMD on the other) needs to be rationalized and sorted out to achieve sensible results.

 

So what can ACE tell us about glyphosate?  From time to time the Army Corps of Engineers posts their schedule for spraying programs to control aquatic plants in Lake Okeechobee.  For example, they used glyphosate in July 2016 for extermination of cattails in Lake Okeechobee and again in March 2017.  So glyphosate is present in Lake Okeechobee, definitely from Army Corps of Engineers’ activities and the SFWMD, starting as early as 1988:

 

https://my.sfwmd.gov/portal/page/portal/pg_grp_tech_pubs/PORTLET_tech_pubs/dre-249.pdf

 

http://www.saj.usace.army.mil/Missions/Environmental/Invasive-Species/Operations-Spray-Schedules/

 

The presence of glyphosate is highly probable from farming activities around and upstream from Lake Okeechobee.  It has already been noted that glyphosate may stimulate blue-green bacterial growth, and that the cloning by natural selection of glyphosate-resistant strains is also possible.  The Lake Managers have yet to come up with an up-to-date, complete analysis of Lake Okeechobee waters, showing how much herbicide is present – at least I have not been able to find it on their websites or other relevant publications – and how many toxins such as microcystin have been detected on a routine basis.  Surely the public has a right to know this vital information.

 

Where has all the Water Gone?

 

Well the problem is that the water in Lake Okeechobee generally does not go anywhere, or not where it is meant to be, that is into the southern Everglades.  The various planning decisions and missteps over the years have converted Lake Okeechobee into a vast semi-static reservoir.  From time to time it gets overfull, even with an enlarged dike, and great volumes of water have to be released by the Army Corps of Engineers to the St Lucie River and the Caloosahatchee Rivers with dire results.

 

An impressive report appeared in 2015 by a team of experts headed up Prof. Wendy Graham of the Water Institute of the University of Florida.  The title of the report says it all:  “Options to Reduce High Volume Freshwater Flows to the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee Estuaries and Move More Water from Lake Okeechobee to the Southern Everglades. An Independent Technical Review by the University of Florida Water Institute”.

 

Click to access UF%20Water%20Institute%20Final%20Report%20March%202015.pdf

 

Prof. Wendy Graham

 

It is a very detailed and comprehensive report and well worth reading because it was produced independently at arm’s length from the politicians, and it is for the most part written in plain and comprehensible language.  It discusses many options to solve the problem and to start getting the lake water back down to the southern Everglades.

 

To my mind, the key thing is to include bio-cleaning and remediation of the lake water before it passes south too far down the Everglades system.  Constructed wetlands for water treatment have been in use since the mid-1950s, including several system using cattails, reeds, and other aquatic plants to remove such things as nitrogen, phosphorus, and other pollutants from waste water.  Such systems could be utilized to good effect in the reservoirs anticipated in areas south of Lake Okeechobee, in effect being “reconstructed wetlands” in place of the former sawgrass plains.

 

https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/GC/article/viewFile/3880/4394

 

To its credit, the South Florida Water Management District has constructed several large wetlands called Stormwater Treatment Areas, which are designed to remove excess phosphorus and other nutrients from waters immediately north of the Everglades Protection Area.  One of them in western Palm Beach County STA-3/4) is the largest constructed wetland in the world.

 

https://www.sfwmd.gov/our-work/wq-stas

 

If the overflow water from Lake Okeechobee is not cleaned to rigorous standards, it will fail to reach the high standards of purity required by federal regulators of the Miccosukee Indian tribal lands in the Everglades south of Alligator Alley (see my blog “Sugar and Indians”):

 

https://jacquithurlowlippisch.com/2017/03/24/roundup-sugarcane-indians-professor-geoffrey-norris-slrirl/

 

 

The Last Word

 

Well, all the above makes for pretty dismal reading for the most part.  But there are several rays of sunshine cutting through the mess that has been created to suggest that all is not lost.  Up in Lake Erie there’s a lot of activity on both sides of the border in reconstructing wetlands to replace those lost to drainage and infill schemes over the last century.  New treatments are being invented to remove phosphorus and other pollutants from the run-off water before it hits the lake. Some of the links below will lead you to more details.

 

http://www.ijc.org/en_/blog/2014/10/28/coastal_wetlands_lake_erie_tnc/

 

http://watercanada.net/2016/addressing-phosphorus-in-lake-erie-with-canadian-technologies/

http://ian.umces.edu/pdfs/ian_report_card_396.pdf

 

http://www.sailingbreezes.com/sailing_breezes_current/articles/jan14/restoring-lake-eries-largest-wetland.html

 

Down in Lake Okeechobee, the South Florida Water Management District is showing the world how to build gigantic constructed wetlands as a start to cleaning up the Okeechobee water ultimately destined for the southern Everglades.  And Florida’s politicians are now making major inroads into passing legislation to fund these schemes, such as Senator Joe Negron’s continuing efforts to get the state House and Senate to agree.

 

https://jacquithurlowlippisch.com/2017/04/26/thank-you-to-the-the-man-in-the-arena-joe-negron-slrirl/

 

Keep up the good work, Joe!

 

“The more that you read, the more things you will know.

The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”

 

Theodor Seuss Geisel (in I Can Read with My Eyes Shut, 1978)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The New River, A Personal Story, SLR/IRL

img_4749
Ed and I along the New River, 2017

The best way to learn to is to live-it.

This weekend a series of coincidences allowed me to personalize and learn the story of Ft Lauderdale’s New River, a neighbor in the water system of the Everglades and the St Lucie River/Indian River Lagoon. It is good to know about your neighbors, as you know, we are all in this water quandary together.

So my husband’s friend Dr Juan Savelli organized an evening at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts. We went to see the former lead singer of Men at Work, Colin Hay. After dinner along Los Olas, we walked across the street to the show.

And there I saw her, the river. Seawalled and controlled, no longer able to freely form a “new river” what made her reputation as told by some of the state’s earliest surveyors; her brown waters were no longer clear and teaming with wildlife as noted in some of the earliest accounts by pioneers and Seminoles; the river had been connected to canals and drainage waters of Lake Okeechobee long ago; nonetheless, she certainly remained beautiful, staring back at me with the city lights of mankind, her lion-tamer, shining behind her.

I stared at the water daydreaming, putting my day of coincidences or “serendipity,” as my mother calls it, together. I had spent the day reading UM student Zach Cosner’s incredible thesis paper, and one part came to mind:

“The trustees of the Internal Improvement Fund… would use this money to build five major canals-the North New River, South New River, Miami, Hillsboro, and Caloosahatchee, all connecting from the southern portion of Lake Okeechobee to the Atlantic Ocean…these canals reached completion towards the end of the 1910s…

Also this day I had visited my neighbor,  Mrs Kelso, who was amazingly celebrating  her 107 birthday! Remarkable. “Sharp as tack,” as they say. Half way through our conversation I asked,”So you were born in…”

“1910” she replied smiling…

fullsizerender-4
Mrs Kelso my neighbor turned 107 today! The New River Canal was completed around 1910, the year of Mrs Kelso’s birth.

“Wow,” I thought to myself, looking at the river. “Mrs Kelso is exactly as old as some of these first Florida Canals! Impressive.”

“Jacqui!” my friends called. “Let’s go! ”

I tuned and at looked at my friends. I turned and looked at the river…”

“Can I get a picture?” I asked.

Ed and I posed.

A flash in time of a river and a story. Hopefully a story that in the future will consist of men and women even more diligently at work for the New River’s complete and full restoration, and that of the entire Everglades system.

Map-of-Canals-1924-St-Archives 2
Canals complete towards end of 1910s, Florida Archives.
img_0413-2
Spanish Land Grant map New River, Florida Memory Project
f10595-gif
1932 canal map. Ray Winkelman, Broward Co.

History

The New River was one of the earliest rivers to be connected to Lake Okeechobee. Highway 27 runs parallel to the canal all the way from the lake to 175. The North Fork of the New  River is attached to the New River Canal; and the South Fork of the New River is connected to the Miami Canal. (see above map) Today it is almost impossible to see the connection of the canals to the river amongst the tangle of development surrounding the river.

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Google map New River and Ft Lauderdale, canals attach near I95
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closeup
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West of I95
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Overview Lake O is just north…

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Video Men at Work Who Could it Be Now> (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SECVGN4Bsgg)

Wikipedia History of New River:

According to a legend attributed in 1940 to the Seminoles by writers working in the Florida Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration, New River had appeared suddenly after a night of strong winds, loud noises, and shaking ground, resulting in the Seminoles calling the river Himmarshee, meaning “new water”. The report of the Writers’ Project attributed the noise and shaking to an earthquake which collapsed the roof of an underground river.[1] Folk historian Lawrence Will relates that the Seminole name for the river was Coontie-Hatchee, for the coontie (Zamia integrifolia) that grew along the river, and that the chamber of commerce tried to change the name of the river to Himmarshee-Hatchee during the Florida land boom of the 1920s.

The English name is derived from early explorer’s maps. The mouth of the river was noted for its tendency to continuously change its entry point into the Atlantic Ocean through the shifting sand of the barrier island. Each time the coast was surveyed and charted the entry point would have shifted. So the location of the mouth would not be on any previous maps, and from off the coast would appear as if it had just developed. With each charting, the location would be recorded with the notation “new river”. Since that was the name used on the maps, that was the name by which the first settlers came to know it, so the name stayed.

From Broward County.org, “The River’s Decline”

Today the New River is in desperate need of repair. This once crystalline waterway has deteriorated under the strains of immense growth. Water quality has been adversely affected from debris, sedimentation, storm water runoff, and other pollutants. Inappropriate land uses near the water have also contributed to the decline of the River and its tributaries. This degradation of water quality and habitat represent a negative impact on the environment, health, and economy of the Broward County metropolitan area.

Video New River, Florida Memory “Then and Now:”

https://www.floridamemory.com/exhibits/floridamaps/ft_lauderdale.php

History New River, Broward Co.

Click to access pub_newriver_1.pdf

New River FDEP: http://www.dep.state.fl.us/southeast/ecosum/ecosums/N_new_river.pdf

Taylor Slough,”The Great Water Disconnect,” SLR/IRL

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Road Trip Series, St Lucie River/Indian River Lagoon-Taylor Slough

Happy New Year to all of my readers!

We begin 2017 at the southern most part of our state, the Florida Everglades. Over the holidays my husband, Ed, and I continued the Road Trip Series further south to gather insights, one that I will share with you today: the great water disconnect of Taylor Slough. We have too much water and it doesn’t have enough. Could we help?

Before we begin, what is a “slough?” What a strange word!

For years I drove along a road in Port St Lucie, north of Stuart, named “Cane Slough.” I wondered to myself what that meant considering the area was paved over. When my mother told me Cane Slough was once a marshy shallow river, I thought how odd that was considering there was not trace of it today. The same thing, but on a much larger scale, has happened in the Florida Everglades and in both instances it is a great loss.

“Slough,” pronounced “slew,” is not just a river, but a river that is made for Florida’s dry and rainy seasons.  It is a slow-moving river whose grassy shores expand and contract. During the dry season when rains are scarce, the remaining water in the deepest part of these depressions is where plants and animals hold on to life-giving water until the rains begin anew…

Before South Florida was developed there were two main sloughs running through the Everglades to Florida Bay. Named, the Shark River, the largest, and Taylor Slew, smaller and further to the east. We must note that Florida Bay the past years has suffered from algae blooms and seagrass die off due to high salinity because Taylor Slew cannot flow southeast. This lack of water affects both land and marine communities.

It is easy to see the great “disconnect” for Taylor Slough on this National Park map. A park ranger informed me that “all water” received into Taylor Slew now comes via canal structures controlled by the South Florida Water Management District.

Yes, some great things finally are happening such as the recent construction of elevated bridges along Tamiami Trail designed to deliver more sheet flow into the park and a  future where  the “Chekika” public access area off 997 could be closed year-round so water could be flowing south. Others too I’ve no room to mention…

One can visually note that restoring this flow is tricky as Homestead’s agricultural and rural development zones abut the old water shed and Broward County north of this area has communities literally in the Everglades (C-11 Basin) that were once part of Taylor Slough as well. Crazy!

But, if we sent men to the moon 50 years ago, shouldn’t we be able to accomplish reconnecting the flow of water “today?” Now, when the Everglades and Florida Bay need it?

How can we along the St Lucie River help speed things up?

…Learn about Senator Negron’s proposal for 60,000 acres of storage, cleaning and conveyance in 2017. Learn about pressuring our government to “face the facts.”

…One thing is certain, we can’t allow the Everglades to die on our watch, and we have exactly what she needs…

Water.

Taylor Slough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Slough
ENP C-111: https://www.nps.gov/ever/learn/nature/c111.htm
C-11(1) Basin: http://c-11.org
C-111: http://palmm.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/fiu%3A3643#page/FI05030101_cover1/mode/2up

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Senate President Joe Negron’s proposed land purchase map, 2017

Who Owns the Land Inside and Outside of the Circles? Mapping Out the Future Of Water, SLR/IRL

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Senate Pres. Elect Joe Negron’s proposal/landownership in EAA, TCRPC 2016

 

Yesterday we talked about the importance of maps and how they allow us to have a vision for the future. For today’s lesson we are going to visually compare Senator Joe Negron’s land proposal map with a map of land ownership. This ownership map was recently created by the Treasure Coast Regional Planning Council (TCRPC) and I shared these maps with Senator Negron prior to the choice of land ownership possibilities.

Learning about lands south of  Lake Okeechobee can be dizzying. The first thing you have to do, not to lose your sense of direction, is to familiarize yourself with the canals. Your  landmarks.

From left to right, the largest canals visible running north/south under Lake Okeechobee are the Miami, New River, Hillsborough, and West Palm Beach. You will also notice the Bolles Canal, (L-21), that runs east/west intersecting. When flying over this area with my husband these canals are the only landmarks that guide me in knowing where I am. Otherwise, it is just miles and miles of sugarcane.

map, canals, South of Lake Okeechobee
Canal map SFWMD

 

I love the TCRPC map below with the list of land owners in the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA). It really makes it easy to “see.” Notice the color coded BLUE: Public (the state or federal government); YELLOW: Private Ownership; and RED: Major Private Ownership.

When I asked the council the difference between private ownership and major private ownership, they said bigger corporations quality as “major private ownership.” One can see by all the red that most of the land under Lake Okeechobee is in major private ownership!

In regard to landownership inside the circles, Isadora Rangel of TC Palm stated in her August 10th article as follows:

“Sugar giant Florida Crystals owns 60 percent of each of those two parcels, Negron said. U.S. Sugar Corp. owns 30 percent of one, and sugar grower King Ranch owns 30 percent of the other. The state and others own the rest of the land. A U.S. Sugar spokesman declined to comment on whether the company will sell. Florida Crystals said it was reviewing Negron’s plan, according to media reports. Negron said he’s “optimistic” the companies will sell and said if the state allocates the money, then negotiations will be easier…”

Well, as we learn about this area (so we can speak in an educated manner to those involved who win on November 8th) let’s look at ALL  of the owners on the map.

1.United Stats Sugar Corporation

2. Okeelanta Corp.

3. New Hope Sugar Co.

4. King Ranch Inc.

5. Wedgeworth Farms Inc.

6. SBG Sugar Farms

7. Stofan Co. Inc.

8. Closter Farms Inc.

9. Sugar Cane Growers

10. New Farm Inc.

We know something about one or two but what about the rest?

In the coming days, we will learn about history of these land owners and the history of what was once the “river of grass.” It will benefit us to review the story of the this area, because it our story too, the story of the slow demise of the St Lucie River/Indian River Lagoon.

 

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TCRPC EAA land ownership map 2016

 

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Negron EAA land purchase proposal 2016

President Elect Senator Joe Negron: https://www.flsenate.gov/senators/s32

TCPalm, Isador Rangel on Negron’s proposal, 8-10-16:

http://archive.tcpalm.com/news/indian-river-lagoon/politics/joe-negron-announces-plan-to-reduce-lake-okeechobee-discharges-3994eb9f-787b-3082-e053-0100007f3d08-389532591.html

TCRPC, EAA ownership map source:http://www.tcrpc.org

Update-Comparison of Lake O Releases, Dr Gary Goforth, 7-14-16 SLR/IRL

The following update Comparison of Lake O Releases was shared by Dr Gary Goforth on 7-14-16. Thank you Dr Goforth. The more informed and studied we are about where the water is going, the better chance we have to change this situation.

Dr Gary Goforth
Dr Gary Goforth

Website: http://garygoforth.net
Updates attached.

A few observations:

1. Lake Okeechobee has received more than twice the watershed inflows since January compared to last year at this time.

2. Discharges from the Lake have increased 25% compared to last year this time, however the distribution of inflows has dramatically changed compared to last year (as you so clearly know):

3. Since January 1,
a. approx. 525 billion gallons of Lake water have been sent to the estuaries (including Lake Worth Lagoon)
b. Lake flows are averaging about 1 billion gallons per day to the St. Lucie River/Estuary and about 2.1 billion gallons per day, and about 0.1 billion gallons /day to Lake Worth Lagoon, for a total of about 3.2 billion gallons per day
c. Twenty-five (25) times more Lake water has been discharged to the estuaries than to the Everglades
d Ag runoff has contributed significant nutrient loads to the St. Lucie River/Estuary:
i. Nitrogen loads: 36% from ag and 54% from Lake
[Dear Gov. Scott and SFWMD Board members: Martin County septic tanks contributed about 2% of the nitrogen load]
ii. Phosphorus loads: 53% from ag and 30% from Lake
e. 93% of the sediment load to the St. Lucie River/Estuary this year has come from the Lake discharges (37 million pounds)

4. Only 32 billion gallons of Lake water have been sent to the STAs this year – less than 1/3 of the amount sent last year at this time.

Gary

“Sacrificed for the Protection of U.S. Sugar and Agricultural Lands…” Dr Goforth Refutes US Sugar Ads, SLR/IRL

 

Engineer, Dr Gary Goforth led the SFWMD Storm Water Treatment Dr. Gary Goforth has more than 30 years of experience in water resources engineering, encompassing strategic planning, design, permitting, construction, operation and program management. design for over a decade.
Dr. Gary Goforth has more than 30 years of experience in water resources engineering, encompassing strategic planning, design, permitting, construction, operation and program management. (Photo JTL, 2015)
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The following was written by Dr Gary Goforth as a response to U.S. Sugar Corporation’s months long ad campaign in the Stuart News.
http://garygoforth.net

· The health and economies of the St. Lucie River and Estuary, the Caloosahatchee Estuary, and Florida Bay have been sacrificed for decades by the management of Lake Okeechobee for the protection of US Sugar and other agricultural lands south of the Lake.

The recent ad blitz by US Sugar appears to be an attempt to divert the public’s attention away from this preferential treatment and from an egregious betrayal of south Florida taxpayers perpetrated by US Sugar, the Florida legislature and the Governor’s administration – the failure to exercise the willing seller contract to purchase US Sugar land south of the lake. Failure to secure needed land south of the Lake is the single biggest obstacle to long-term protection of the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee estuaries from destructive Lake discharges, and providing Florida Bay and lower east coast wellfields with needed water.

· Water storage necessary to reduce high flows to the estuaries by about 90% will require about 10% of the land in the EAA – not complete elimination of farming in the area. The recent UF Water Institute study reconfirmed what scientists have been saying for decades – additional storage and treatment beyond what is currently planned in CERP and CEPP is needed south of the Lake: “If this required storage were to be provided strictly though deep 12-ft reservoirs, new land area between approximately 11,000 and 43,000 acres would be required south of Lake Okeechobee.” The upper limit – 43,000 acres – is less than ¼ of the amount of land US Sugar was willing to sell to the state (187,000 acres).

· Regarding the numbers in the ads – some are accurate, some are completely fictitious (e.g., the distribution of water from Lake Okeechobee), and many critical numbers are missing, e.g.,

-millions of pounds of nitrogen and phosphorus from lake Okeechobee that  feed algal blooms and wreak havoc on the ecology of the river, estuary, lagoon and near-shore reefs. (million off pounds of nutrients that the State of Florida ignores in their BMAP progress reports for the St Lucie River.)
– the hundreds of millions of pounds of Lake Okeechobee sediment that turned a once sand-bottom clear water estuary into a muck-filled lagoon that belches blackwater every time it rains.
– the hundreds of millions of dollars of economic impact to local businesses, tourism and real estate values attributable to poor water quality
If you’re interested go to the SFWMD’s (or my) website.

· Most of the area that the ads calls “local waterways” did not flow into the St. Lucie River (SLR) until after the major agricultural drainage canals (C-23, C-24, C-25 and C-44) were dug, connecting more than 250,000 acres to the SLR. Historically these areas flowed north into the St. Johns River watershed, south into the Loxahatchee and Everglades watersheds, evaporated or recharged the groundwater.

· The ads ignore the fact that more than half of the “local watershed” is agriculture, and that more than half of the flows and nutrient loads to the St. Lucie River and Estuary come from agricultural land use.

· Nutrient loads from septic tanks along the Indian River Lagoon need to be addressed in cost-effective ways based on good science. Nevertheless, nutrient loading and sediment from Lake Okeechobee and agricultural runoff constitute a far greater threat to the health of the St. Lucie Estuary than does loading from Martin County septic tanks. The loading from septic tanks in Martin County have been overstated by upwards of 200-300%.

· The 2016 Florida Legislature was an unmitigated disaster for the environment of Florida, with misappropriations of Amendment 1 funds for the second year in a row and the passage of a water bill that rolled back environmental protection for the benefit of agricultural interests. What role did lobbyists for US Sugar and other agricultural interests play in this debacle? —–Dr. Gary Goforth

*Dr. Goforth has more than 30 years of experience in water resources engineering encompassing strategic planning, design, permitting, construction, operation and program management. For the last 25 years, his focus has been on large-scale environmental restoration programs in the Kissimmee-Okeechobee-Everglades ecosystem. He was the Chief Consulting Engineer during the design, construction and operation of the $700 million Everglades Construction Project, containing over 41,000 acres of constructed wetlands.  He is experienced in public education, water quality treatment design and evaluation, engineering design and peer review, systems ecology, statistical hydrology, hydrologic modeling, hydrodynamic modeling, water quality modeling, environmental permit acquisition and administration, hydrologic and water quality performance analyses. (Website: http://garygoforth.net)

 

Ad 6-10-15 Stuart News.
Ad 6-10-15 Stuart News.

Overcoming the Propaganda of U.S. Sugar Corporation in the Stuart News, SLR/IRL

US Sugar ad, Stuart News, May 1, 2016.
US Sugar ad, Stuart News, May 1, 2016.
Full page ad 5-1-16 US Sugar, Stuart News.
Full page ad 5-1-16 US Sugar, Stuart News.

It’s easier to communicate your message when you have billions of dollars, but it is not a limiting factor if you don’t…

Today, I will share a “Draft Report” from Dr Gary Goforth. This report is a response he has created specifically to U.S. Sugar Corporation’s May 1st full- page ad in the Stuart News entitled: “The Water That Ends Up In Our Local Waterways.”

This is one of multiple full-page ads U.S. Sugar Corporation has run in the local Martin County paper over that past months trying to “educate” our citizenry. Why are they spending so much money doing this? Why all the propaganda? Because they know that though our advocacy for the St Lucie River/Indian River Lagoon, we are changing the course of human events. For the first time, many people and some important politicians and are looking at South Florida and saying “It needs to be re-plumbed…..”

Dr Goforth (http://garygoforth.net) is no stranger to these water issues, nor to the controversy and ability to manipulate the numbers complicated by the historic and supportive relationship between those doing business in the Everglades Agricultural Area south of the lake and today’s South Florida Water Management District. Thus the intertwined propaganda.

So here we go, each idea is presented on a separate slide. You can click the slide to enlarge if you need to. Thank you Dr Goforth!

DRAFT COMMENTS ON U.S. SUGAR AD—G.GOFORTH 5-4-16

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Full page ad 5-1-16 US Sugar, Stuart News.
Full page ad 5-1-16 US Sugar, Stuart News.

(http://www.ussugar.com)

1856 pre drainage
1856 pre drainage

Are Lake Okeechobee’s Drained Lands Really Ours to Navigate? SLR/IRL

Lake O has been drained and lowered so that it is 250 square miles smaller than it was in the mid 1800s.
Lake O has been drained and lowered so that it is approximately 250 square miles smaller than it was in the mid 1800s. (SFWMD) Florida became a state in 1845.

“Navigable waters of the state” are protected under Florida law. They cannot be sold–they cannot be owned. They belong to the public…

Although the Swamp Lands Act of the 1850s allowed for drainage of Florida’s swamp lands, in some instances the drainage and claims may have been overdone. In accordance with state law “you can’t convey what you do not own.” This is part of what is known as “The Public Trust Doctrine.”

Hmmm? In all the excitement to develop, did the state break its own rules in conveying lands south and around the lake? Certainly powerful entities own those lands today.

—–That would be a bite wouldn’t it?

Let’s look a bit closer….

It is common knowledge that Lake Okeechobee has lost a tremendous amount of its former self, and that large portions of the lake have been drained and diked for agriculture and development.

Just recently while attending a  University of Florida Natural Resources Leadership Institute presentation in Clewiston, Jeff Summers of the South Florida Water Management District gave a Power-Point presentation using the slide below. It shows the natural vs. altered conditions of the lake going from approximately 1000 sq miles in the 1850s  to 750 square miles today. –Thus the approximate water stage has gone from 20 feet to 14 feet. Definitely a loss of navigable waters–don’t you think? Today those lands around the lake are used for growing mostly sugarcane. Today most of those lands are “owned.” How could this be as they were once under water enough to be “navigable waters of the state?”

Slide from Jeff Summer's power point presentation SFWMD, 2016.
Slide from Jeff Summer’s power point presentation SFWMD, 2016.

The excerpt below is straight out of the “Florida Bar Journal” as shared by my brother Todd. After reading the paragraph, click on the link below to read the entire article. It is certainly worth thinking about…The maps below show land ownership.

Florida Bar Journal’s article conclusion:

The Public Trust Doctrine imposes a legal duty on the state to preserve and control title and use of all lands beneath navigable water bodies, including the shore or space between ordinary high and ordinary low water, for public use and enjoyment. The people of this state have raised the protection afforded by the doctrine to constitutional stature. In the most recent challenge to this doctrine, the Florida Supreme Court relied upon this constitutional provision in reconfirming longstanding Florida law that swamp deeds do not create a private property interest in sovereignty lands. Attempts to use swamp deeds as a justification to legislatively redefine the ordinary high water boundary and thus transfer all or part of the shore to the adjacent private owner are similarly inappropriate and unconstitutional.

Full article Florida Bar Journal, April 2001: http://www.floridabar.org/DIVCOM/JN/JNJournal01.nsf/Articles/8D98D298C0060C0785256B110050FFB7

Map of land ownership TCRPC 2016
Map of land ownership south and around Lake O TCRPC 2016. Key below.
Key
Key to above map, 2016 TCRPC.
The bigger picture. Lake O used to flow to the Everglades. Google Earth map 2016.
The bigger picture: Lake O used to flow to the Everglades but is now directed to the northern estuaries St Lucie/IRL and Caloosahatchee causing great destruction.  Google Earth, 2016.

 

Navigable Waters of the State: http://www.floridageomatics.com/publications/legal/submerged1.htm

Lake O Discharge Aerial Photos 2-21-16, SLR/IRL

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Dead pelican floating in discharge water, photo from Jupiter Island's, Guardians.
Dead pelican floating in discharge water, recent photo from Jupiter Island’s, photo credit: The Guardians.

These aerial photos were taken around 4PM by my husband, Ed Lippisch, this past Sunday, 2-21-16. They show the Lake Okeechobee/area canals’ plume moving south along Jupiter Island over nearshore reefs. There are photos of the exclusive neighborhood, Sailfish Point, at the mouth of the St Lucie Inlet as well.

High levels of Lake Okeechobee and canal discharge water (7000 cfs +/- at S-80) continue to decimate the seagrasses, oysters, fish, and bird life of the St Lucie River/Indian River Lagoon. Our reef communities and property values are also affected.

Unfortunately, even with unprecedented state and federal actions of the South Florida Water Management District and the Army Corp of Engineers to “move water south” from the Water Conservation Areas to Everglades National Park, there is presently no end in sight for the northern estuaries.

There has to be a better way. “Finishing the projects” is not enough….

Over the weekend at my niece Julia’s lacrosse game I ran into a former fellow commissioner, and long time Martin County resident, Dr Paul Schoppe.

“Hey Jacqui,” he said. “I was just thinking about you…”

“Oh really, ” I replied.

“Yes. I was thinking about you when I went down to my dock and saw a dead Snook floating in the foamy dark water….. What are we doing about this river…..?”

Yesterday, I received a call from a Sewall’s Point resident informing me of a phone call he got from a friend in real estate. The friend was photographing the water at his listing on the St Lucie River and forwarding the photos saying: “I hope the buyers don’t cancel when they see the water. They are doing their walk through today.”

At Publix, that evening, I ran into an old-timer of Stuart. He said to me: “Jacqui of course there have been releases from the lake for years…the difference now is that the water is so polluted….”

There has to be a better way.

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Department of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) Update on Lake Okeechobee as seen on Vacation Rentals site: http://vacationrentalscoop.com/sanibel-rentals/sanibel-local-news/daily-update-on-lake-okeechobee-2-22-16/

The ACOE has been releasing into the SLR/IRL since January 30th, 2016, http://w3.saj.usace.army.mil/h2o/reports.htm
 

Summary of Lake releases for 2016 compared to 2013 and the last big El Nino event (1997-1998), SLR/IRL

Today I am sharing in full Dr Gary Goforth’s ( http://garygoforth.net/resume.htm) note and summary of Lake Okeechobee releases for 2016 compared to 2013 and the last big El Nino event (1997-1998) as presented to Martin County.  Please click on slides for larger view and thank you Dr Goforth for helping us with the numbers.

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….Slide 1

 

From the desk of Dr Gary Goforth regarding slide presentation:

1. More than 113,000 acre feet (36.9 billion gallons) of Lake water (“blackwater”) has been dumped to the River/Estuary during the first 20 days of the 2016 Lake releases; this is equal to 27% of the entire 147-day 2013 event, and 11% of the 1998 event.

2. The 2016 average daily rate of Lake releases is slightly less than the average 1998 rate, and more than twice the 2013 rate.

3. A distinguishing feature of the 2016 event is exceptionally high rates of C-44 Basin runoff in combination with the high Lake releases.

4. The 2016 average daily C-44 Basin runoff rate is 4 times the runoff rate of 1998, and more than twice the 2013 rate.

5. The 2016 average daily rate of combined flows through S-80 is more than the 1998 rate, and more than twice the 2013 rate.

6. The 2016 maximum daily rate of combined flows through S-80 is less than the 1998 maximum flow, but more than the 2013 maximum flow.

7. The 2016 Lake releases have already contributed more than twice the annual TMDL for phosphorus and nitrogen.

2016 data are preliminary and subject to revision.

I was on the IRL yesterday and travelled from the St. Lucie Inlet to the Ft. Pierce inlet – I saw no pockets of clear water and visibility was only 6 inches – 18 inches. I can’t imagine the sea grasses are getting any sunlight; I certainly didn’t see any sea grasses from the surface.

Gary

 

SLIDE PRESENTATION:

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….Slide 1

Notes: 1. More than 113,000 acre feet (36.9 billion gallons) of Lake water (“blackwater”) has been dumped to the River/Estuary during the first 20 days of the 2016 Lake releases; this is equal to 27% of the entire 2013 releases, and 11% of the 1997-1998 event. 2. The 2016 average daily rate of Lake releases is slightly less than the average 1998 rate, and more than twice the 2013 rate. 3. The 2016 average daily C-44 Basin runoff rate is 4 times the runoff rate of 1998, and more than twice the 2013 rate. 4. The 2016 average daily rate of combined flows through S-80 is more than the 1998 rate, and more than twice the 2013 rate. 5. The 2016 maximum daily rate of combined flows through S-80 is less than the 1998 maximum flow, but more than the 2013 maximum flow. 6. The 2016 Lake releases have contributed more than twice the annual TMDL for phosphorus and nitrogen. 7. 2016 data are preliminary and subject to revision.

 

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…..Slide 2
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…..Slide 5
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…..Slide 6

 

 

 

 

Why is it So Hard To Send Water South? SLR/IRL

 

WCAs public photo
Water Conservation Areas as seen below the Everglades Agricultural Area. South Florida is compartmentalized to control water to “protect” farms and people ….this does always work.

We are in rain-year not seen before….

The state is overflowing…..

Our St Lucie River/Indian River Lagoon is again being destroyed by too much fresh, dirty, water….

Why is it so hard to send this water south?

It is “so hard to move water south” because the state of Florida has been compartmentalized to protect the Everglades Agricultural Area south of Lake Okeechobee and to keep-dry much of the lands that we live on. And now our waters are polluted…

Imagine, if you would, what would be going on here in South Florida now if modern man had never “conquered” it….Basically it would be a clean free-flowing marsh all the way from Shingle Creek in Orlando through Lake Okeechobee to the Everglades.

Well that it is no longer the case, is it?  Since the 1920s, and more so since the 1940s, these lands have been drained, and diked, and altered, so that humans can grow food, and live here –inadvertently polluting the system. It is an imperfect situation and we must try to understand it, so we can make it better as we all need clean water.

1850s map of Florida
1850s map of Florida
Today's flow from Lake Okeechobee. (Image Everglades Foundation.)
Today’s flow into SLR and Caloosahatchee from Lake Okeechobee used to flow south.

So for the everyday person trying to figure out “what is going on” right now, let’s take a look at “today:”

  1. It has been raining lot. Since the end of January, the St Lucie River/Indian River Lagoon and Caloosahatchee are being destroyed once again as the state of Florida and the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers dump incoming waters out of Lake Okeechobee so that the Everglades Agricultural Area south of the lake and surrounding communities are not flooded. Drainage and property in our area is part of this too.
  2. A rare situation occurred this past week where Florida’s governor, Rick Scott, issued an order to release water south through a canal into the Everglades. He had to confer with the US ACOE to do this. (Due to poor water quality and safety,  just “sending water south” is not allowed. But now with so much water, it is an emergency.)
  3. The Water Conservation Areas south of the EAA, —these gigantic areas (see bottom slide) that are considered part of the Everglades and full of wildlife and in some places sacred Native American tree islands, are so full of water that they have to be dumped first. If they are lowered, then more water can enter from the Everglades Agricultural Area and hopefully Lake Okeechobee itself. Then, and only then, would there be less dumping into the St Lucie River/IRL and Caloosahatchee. We have a long way to go and its not even “rainy season.”

I commend all those working hard to alleviate the overflowing system and I encourage investment in working to improve this relic as well as investment in the children who must be part of the goal to re-plumb this system. Dr Gary Goforth shows us how it is working right now as I asked for a simple explanation to share with the River Kidz.

Gary Goforth
Gary Goforths’ image to explain “water going south.”

“Jacqui—

Due to increased stormwater pumping from the EAA and surrounding areas and direct rainfall, the water levels in the WCAs are too high. Last week the Gov. sent a letter to the Corps requesting authorization to raise water levels in the Tamiami Canal allowing increased flows into the Park through Northeast Shark River Slough. Yesterday the District began making those increased discharges through structure S-333. Whether or not the District will send additional Lake water south is yet to be seen – lowering the stage in the WCAs should help. See the map above. (from page 2 of the attached).”

Gary (http://garygoforth.net/resume.htm)
______________________________

Here you can read: Press Release Gov. Scott

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 11, 2016
CONTACT: GOVERNOR’S PRESS OFFICE
(850) 717-9282
media@eog.myflorida.com

DEP and FWC Issue Orders to Allow Army Corps of Engineers to Ease Effects of Flooding

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Today, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) issued orders that will allow the U.S. Army Corps to move more water south through Shark River Slough to ease the effects of flooding in South Florida. Click HERE (http://www.flgov.com/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/FFWCC.pdf)
to see the orders.

Earlier today, Governor Scott sent a letter to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to take immediate action to relieve the flooding of the Everglades Water Conservation Areas and the releases of water from Lake Okeechobee to the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie Estuaries. To read the letter, click HERE (http://www.flgov.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/2.11.161.pdf).

South Florida and WCAs
South Florida and WCAs

WCA 3B: http://www.dep.state.fl.us/southeast/ecosum/ecosums/wca3b.pdf

SFWMD WCAs information sheet: http://www.sfwmd.gov/portal/page/portal/xrepository/sfwmd_repository_pdf/jtf_wca_management.pdf

SFWMD: Just the Facts on this rain year: http://www.sfwmd.gov/portal/page/portal/xrepository/sfwmd_repository_pdf/jtf_2015-16_dry_season_rainfall.pdf

The Everglades’ sister, Big Cypress Swamp, SLR/IRL

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Map showing Big Cypress Swamp next to the Everglades. Also note Lake Okeechobee.

The maps and information in today’s blog is taken from an article entitled “Big Cypress Swamp,” by Benjamin F. McPherson, that is included in the 1974, “Environments of South Florida Past and Present,” complied by Patrick J. Gleason.  As I have mentioned previously this week, this text was lent to my by Dr Gary Goforth who gives insight into understanding our St Lucie River/Indian River Lagoon system and our Lake Okeechobee and canal issues.

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….cover
....The Everglades and Big Cypress Swamp.
….The Everglades and Big Cypress Swamp.

This above map gives one an idea of how far east the Everglades used to go and how much development has crept in (see below)….how come agriculture and development didn’t totally take over Big Cypress? Well, perhaps they could not stop the water….

West of the red lines shows the edge of what was once the Everglades in South Florida. Development has crept and continues to creep over this edge. (Photo/map courtesy of Chappy Young,/GCY Surveyors, 2014.)
West of the red lines shows the edge of what was once the Everglades in South Florida. Development has crept and continues to creep over this edge. (Photo/map courtesy of Chappy Young,/GCY Surveyors, 2014.)

Big Cypress Swamp…we may not think of it too much over here on the east coast but we should  study it as well. It is sister to the Everglades and people fought to save parts of it and were successful. It became one of our nation’s first national preserves in the same year Patrick Gleason’s text was published, 1974. I was ten years old and my family had just moved to a very undeveloped Sewall’s Point.

Today I will transcribe from the parts of the summary from McPherson’s work. I like reading the old texts. Sometimes they seem more clear and easier to understand. It helps us understand how things have changed looking an old book like we grew up with instead of  today’s electronic media.

Excerpts from “Big Cypress Swamp,” by Benjamin F. McPherson

“The Big Cypress Swamp differs form the adjacent Everglades in topography, soil, water quality, and vegetation. Because the swamp has relatively more high land, inundation soil deposit are less extensive in  the swamp than the Everglades. Soil in the swamp is usually a thin layer of marl sand or mixture of the two or is absent where limestone crops out where as soil in the Everglades is usually deeper organic peat. Vegetation in the swamp is closely associated with typography, water inundation, and soils,  and is more diverse and forested than in the Everglades…

Big Cypress Swamp is a flat, swamp area of about 3120 square kilometers in SW Florida. It is seasonally inundated over as much as 90 % its surface area. Water moves slowly to the south by overland flow toward the estuaries. Fifty -six percent of the surface water that flows into Everglades National Park comes from the Big Cypress. A substantial amount of water also enters Conservation Area 3 from the Swamp. The western part of the Swamp is drained by canals and no longer floods extensively…

The quality of water in the big Cypress, particularly in the untrained parts is in generally of better quality that the water in the Everglades. Some contamination by metals pesticides and other potentially toxic chemicals does occur however….

Up close map 2 drainage of Big Cypress
Up close map 2 drainage of Big Cypress
Summary
Full summary from article 

Part of Big Cypress Swamp became a national preserve in 1974: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Cypress_National_Preserve. It is to be appreciated and protected. This is all part of our South Florida water system.

Dr Gary Goforth:http://garygoforth.net