Click photo to enlarge. [Photo: Joseph Melanson / Skypic]

We’re all familiar with the Everglades restoration program — produced after years of litigation, study and debate by environmentalists, government and industry and finally signed into law in 2000. Originally pegged at $8 billion, the cost for the largest environmental restoration project in U.S. history has grown to $10.1 billion and could run billions of dollars more.

But it turns out that the plan largely overlooked a massive piece without which it can’t succeed — 730-square-mile Lake Okeechobee and the region stretching northward all the way to Orlando International Airport.

Listen as Mike Vogel shares the 6,000 year old lake's history. All is not perfect after man came. Click here.

Oddly enough, in a year that has seen the lake suffer such a drought that it shrunk to 450 square miles and the exposed lake bed caught fire, Lake Okeechobee’s problem is actually too much water — and too much phosphorus — pouring in from dairy farms, ranches and developments north of the lake. Water managers now realize that cleaning up the flow south of the lake won’t work without addressing upstream as well.

Fixing the oversight will be just as monumental a task, involving as large an area and potentially as much money as replumbing southern Florida for the Everglades.

“It became very clear that there was a big hole in the Everglades restoration program,” says Carol Ann Wehle, executive director of the regional water manager, the South Florida Water Management District. “We’re never going to restore the Everglades if we don’t get the water coming into the system right.”

UNSTABLE: Rebuilding the weakened Herbert Hoover Dike will cost almost $1 billion. [Photo: Jeffrey Camp]

By Any Name, No Cheap Fix

What once was the Lake Okeechobee watershed has a new name. The lake, the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee estuaries and their basins now carry the more charismatic moniker of “Northern Everglades.” And while no one’s priced it down to the last pile of cow manure that will have to be cleaned up, there are indications that fixing the Northern Glades will be as pricey as restoring its similarly sized, but more famous, downstream counterpart. To clean the water, count on expensive land purchases for huge water-holding areas, use of new green technologies and planting great numbers of phosphorus-absorbing plants. It’ll cost $887 million to fix the dike alone. And people around the central Florida chain of lakes that feeds Okeechobee will want their waters safeguarded too.

“By the time it’s all said and done and you tally up what it’s going to cost, it’s probably going to be much bigger than” the comprehensive Everglades restoration, says Malcolm “Bubba” Wade Jr., a member of the South Florida Water Management District’s governing board and U.S. Sugar senior vice president.

Gov. Charlie Crist in June signed a law extending Save Our Everglades trust fund spending by 10 years to 2020, adding $94 million a year — to be matched by the district — for lake and estuary restoration. “This is an unbelievable commitment to keeping our state clean, to protecting our natural resources,” Crist said. “Teddy Roosevelt would be proud today of what we’re doing here in Florida.”

There will be indirect costs from more regulation too. The state is cracking down on fertilizer overuse in lawns, farmland, golf courses and other property. Soon, Florida will become only the second state, after Montana, to have statewide fertilizer regulation. The South Florida Water Management District, the region’s water manager, wants tougher regulations to force developers to set aside more land for environmental reasons, construct water-holding areas and take other steps to prevent tainted water runoff. “A lot of these nutrients have come from development, and shame on us if we restore our ecosystem to just have it degraded again because we didn’t fix the way we ask people to design and build subdivisions,” says water district Executive Director Carol Ann Wehle.

Wehle says she believes that while the Northern Everglades fix will be “in the billions,” it won’t match restoration of the Everglades proper in cost.

Audubon’s Lake Okeechobee science coordinator, Paul Gray, says studies being done for the plan that the district is required to present to the Legislature in February will provide a better handle on cleanup costs. But what is clear to Gray, after seeing the broken system’s effect on farmers, estuary communities and the fishing business, is what happens if nothing’s done. Says Gray, “The cost of not fixing is also astronomical.”