| 14 May 2010
The Army Corps and South Florida Water Management District got an earful at public meetings this week.
On Tuesday, May 11, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) Jacksonville District Commander, Colonel Al Pantano, addressed Lee County residents and the Lee County Commission regarding the unseasonably high flow releases being discharged from Lake Okeechobee.
On May 12 and 13, the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) Governing Board and Colonel Pantano heard public comment on the affects of those releases on the estuaries at the Governing Board meeting in Stuart. The message they heard from both Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie advocates was loud and clear: find alternatives to blowing out our natural resources.
Your calls and letters to the Corps and the SFWMD Governing Board were heard. SCCF policy staff made public comments on finding additional emergency options for storage and on the adaptive protocols for managing lake releases. Unfortunately the man-made flood control system created over 60 years ago in South Florida depends on dumping massive quantities of water down the two rivers to their coastal estuaries. Changing the status quo will require continued communication with the District and the Corps.
In 2005, then Sanibel Mayor Carla Brooks Johnston challenged
the SFWMD to find 450,000 acre-ft of emergency, alternative storage –
an amount equivalent to one foot of water off the lake -- to relieve
the estuaries. At the Governing Board meeting this week, the District
announced they have 126,350 acre-ft of water storage already online and
that they are working on another 366,700 acre-ft of storage.
click here for a link to map and storage locations list
The crushing reality is that none of the storage for lake water is south of the lake, where it all flowed historically. The storage that currently exists south of the lake is used up by Ag for their own runoff. So until alternative storage is available and the U.S. Sugar purchase moves forward, there are few alternatives for the amount of water being dumped out the estuaries to tide.
The lake is currently at 14.8 feet, a level more normal in the middle of the rainy season. The Corps needs to lower the level for the safety of the dike but the Colonel has committed to being as conservative as possible, holding water in the lake longer if it can help reduce estuary releases. However, at the current discharge rate to the Caloosahatchee and St Lucie, it will take 40 days to drop the lake one foot, the target the Corps will try to meet before rainy season begins. This time of year the greatest discharge of water out of the lake is to the air -- through evapotranspiration, commonly called ET. The current ET rate is more than both discharges combined. Therefore, the more land we can saturate and spread the water on, the greater the ET, resulting in less water dumped to tide. So we continue to press for sites throughout the system – north, south, east and west -- to be saturated or flooded to the greatest extent possible.
On Wednesday, the Corps began a 10-day Caloosahatchee pulse release that will continue the exceptionally high releases that began in April. These flows are ten times greater than healthy flows, discharging out to the Gulf on average 3.2 billion gallons per day of freshwater –- the equivalent of a 60-day water supply for the 600,000 residents of Lee County.
The centerpiece of Everglades restoration is recapturing land to store and treat water in the remaining greater Everglades ecosystem. While we work on finding emergency alternative storage for the short term we realize that the U.S. Sugar purchase is the most meaningful opportunity we have to recreate flows south out of Lake O to the Everglades, Eveglades National Park, Florida Bay and Biscayne Bay.
Next week Rae Ann Wessel will be in Washington, DC at the first Everglades Summit, lobbying Congress to ensure funding for this critical project. Everglades restoration now has new momentum, resulting from four project groundbreakings in the past six months. For our out-of-state residents, it is crucial that legislators nationwide hear from you about the tremendous value of the Everglades and the need for restoration funding.
