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Environment
Voices of Lake Okeechobee
Meet a farmer, an activist, an environmentalist, the fish finders, the immigrants and the berm buster, the people who are at odds.
Seeking a Solution
 "We’ve done a good job of tying the environment to our economy." — Paul Gray Lake Okeechobee science coordinator, Audubon of Florida [Photo: Jeffrey Camp] |
Over a fried oyster sandwich, Gray consults his patient’s chart. One problem troubles him particularly — phosphorus counts. Despite years of taxpayer money to buy out dairies and retrofit others to control nutrient runoff from cow manure, seven of the worst 11 years for phosphorus entering the lake have occurred since 1995.
Why? Too much water. Florida entered a warmer-wetter period in 1995 — the same phenomenon that increases hurricane frequency — and more water means more phosphorus.
The new weather pattern does three things:
- Stirs up, through hurricanes, the nutrient-laden muck, damaging the habitat and everywhere else the water dumps nitrogen and phosphorus as it flows.
- Brings droughts in a rough five- to 10-year cycle that, exacerbated by man-made flood control, cripple the lake for years. It recovers just in time to be crushed by the next drought. “If it takes five or 10 years to recover, you’re talking about a system that’s never going to get better,” Gray says.
- Calls into question the plan to clean up the Everglades, because that plan was modeled on cooler, drier periods that produce half as much water, Gray says. The existing lake system, and the replumbed one, simply can’t handle the extra water.
His argument: To clean water before it reaches the Everglades, Florida has spent $700 million constructing 47,000-acre water-holding filter marshes south of the lake. The marshes allow phosphorus to settle out and be absorbed by plants. They work but can handle only six inches of water a year in a good year — and only two inches of hurricane-churned, nutrient-rich water. The rub: The 2004 hurricanes put six feet of water into the lake in just a year.
The solution, Gray and water managers agree, is to store more water north of the lake — no small task. Gray estimates water storage capacity needs to be twice what plans call for. The amount that has to be stored would cover everything in the lake’s watershed — from Orlando International Airport down through Osceola, Highlands and Okeechobee counties — under an
average of six inches of water.
 POLLUTED: Seven of the worst 11 years for phosphorus flows into Lake Okeechobee have occurred since 1995. |
Gray is optimistic that demand from estuary communities, lake residents, south Florida homeowners, agricultural interests and environmentalists will see a lake solution through. He heads for Stuart to see Gov. Charlie Crist sign a law putting $94 million a year into cleaning the Northern Everglades. “A tremendous gift from the Legislature,” Gray says. “We’ve done a good job of tying the environment to our economy.”
