Lake Okeechobee and the Estuaries

The Past 

It was an old idea, dating back to the 1880s - drain the swampy Everglades south of Lake Okeechobee and develop agriculture. The hurricane of 1928 was an even better reason. More than 2,000 people died when the lake sloshed over its meager southern dikes into the surrounding farming communities of Belle Glade, Pahokee and South Bay. To protect the farmers and open the area to agriculture, the earthen Herbert Hoover Dike was erected around the lake. Completed in 1933, the 35-foot-tall berm transformed Lake Okeechobee into a 730-square-mile water-filled bowl. Two rivers - the Caloosahatchee to the west and the St. Lucie to the east - whose headwaters did not reach the lake, were re-engineered and dredged to provide a pathway to the lake from both directions. Hundreds of millions of gallons of Everglades-bound water were siphoned to the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean resulting in serious ecological consequences. "Water that was intended for the Everglades as well as to sustain the water supply for millions of people was being wasted," says Dr. Rosanna Rivero, a scientist with the Everglades Foundation.

The Present

Meanwhile, the meandering and serpentine Kissimmee River that brought seasonal water flow into the lake was straightened and connected to canals draining agricultural land. Runoff from the agricultural land carried pollutants and nutrients downstream. "The effect was to speed up the water flowing into the lake," Rivero says. The lake's water level is controlled to provide flood control as well as water for agriculture and drinking. Water flowing into the lake from the north led to nutrient and other pollutant contamination of the lake and the estuaries. "The Everglades is now half the size of what the ecosystem used to be and the system's water quality has suffered," says Dr. Melodie Naja, a water quality scientist with the Everglades Foundation. The ecosystem that supported the natural cycles of wet and dry, no longer has the capacity for adequate water storage. "The habitat that allowed plant and animal life to adapt to the seasonal water cycles that included overflows south of the lake is short-circuited," says Dr. Stephen Davis III, wildlife ecologist, Everglades Foundation. "Fish and wading birds are affected throughout the system."

The Project

Comprehensive Everglades restoration efforts are contingent on providing three things that have been compromised by man's development of Florida: water storage, water quality and water distribution. Acquisition of land in an area south of Lake Okeechobee -- known as the Everglades Agricultural Area -- provides for the most cost-effective options for water storage, water treatment and distribution to rehabilitate the Everglades.

The Everglades Foundation supports an initiative by the state of Florida to secure 73,000 acres of land owned by the U.S. Sugar Corp. south of the lake for Everglades restoration. This land will be turned into water storage and water treatment areas, the first step in a process to acquire approximately 100,000 acres needed to save the Everglades.

The state has a 10-year option to acquire 107,500 more acres. The land, much of it directly south of the lake, will be converted into water filtering marshes and water storage areas, expanding the restoration plans already planned. The marshes will be designed to naturally cleanse the water of its man-made nutrients as it flows south. The storage areas will hold water that will be distributed to the Everglades as needed in times of drought or held to sustain the human water supply.

"The U.S. Sugar land purchase solves two of the three major problems impacting the Everglades - the water quality and the water supply issues," says Dr. Tom Van Lent, senior scientist, Everglades Foundation. Foundation scientists are conducting several projects related to Lake Okeechobee, including modeling pollution in the Lower Kissimmee basin and the lake. Scientists are also mapping and measuring phosphorus in shallow water habitats of the lake. The results will allow the Foundation to propose methods and alternatives to governing agencies to better regulate the flow of water from farm runoff into the Kissimmee River and the lake and limit the resulting pollution. Scientists also participate on committees developing plans for managing the phosphorus content of the lake and in creating alternatives for water storage from lake discharges, particularly into the Caloosahatchee.

The Future

The purchase of the remaining 107,500 acres of U.S. Sugar land is significant to the future of the restoration plan because it adds more cleansing marshes and water storage area. Plans to improve the Kissimmee River and restore wetlands and water storage in the river basin are under way. This reduces the amount of water draining too rapidly into the lake, resulting in the wasteful discharge of this precious resource into the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers.

"No single entity is tackling or can tackle all of these issues," Van Lent says. "It's actually a concerted effort on the part of government agencies, non-profit organizations such as ours and research entities to get this accomplished." The single most important project being accomplished by Foundation scientists is not in-the-lab, test-tube science. It's the synthesis of all scientific work conducted on the entire Everglades ecosystem from the Kissimmee River through Lake Okeechobee and into the southern Everglades and Florida Bay.

"The project combines all the available information and seeing which is most likely to get us to the goal," says Van Lent. "This will guide us to recommend public policy that will lead to decisions to fix the ecosystem." The initiative, financed by the U.S. Department of the Interior, involves explaining the work of 15 top scientists in Everglades-related fields for the past decade and making their work understandable to decision-makers and the public. "We're taking the reports off the shelf and making them useful," says Van Lent. "We're the bridge between the laboratory and the real application of the science. We make the science useful."