NEWS

South Florida green with envy (at our waters)

Staff Writer
St. Augustine Record

For the beleaguered fishing guides, marinas, bait shops, kayak rentals and the residents who simply enjoy getting a breath of fresh air outdoors, it’s a very bad time for both Southeast and Southwest Florida.

Lake Okeechobee is putrefying, simmering in its own filth and swelling quickly. Near-record rains have raised the lake to dangerous levels.

Lack of any real management, pollutants have been pumped into the state’s largest lake by agriculture, septic tanks and Orlando. That’s set up another year of massive, green algae blooms, similar to the disaster in 2016. This one, many feel, may be worse yet. That’s because scientists say Hurricane Irma hit Lake O like a washing machine, churning up years of nutrients settled into the lake bottom.

Winds stack the slime up into thick carpets. It bakes in the sun. It turns toxic. It burns your eyes and sickens you nose.

The lake level last week was more than 14 feet above sea level. The old earthen dam is structurally unfit to hold back that much water for long. So the option is to open the threatened dam and discharge millions of acres of watery slime. Ninety percent of the lake is covered this week — that’s 660 square miles of disaster waiting to happen.

The discharge could start today. It will eventually flow east through the St. Lucie River into the Atlantic or west, through the Caloosahatchee River and empty into the Gulf of Mexico.

But it destroys life along the way, especially when it hits the Intracoastal Waterway to the east. Tides take it up and down the river. It not only harms animals and fish with its toxins, but it shields the sea grasses from sunlight and oxygen, interfering with the necessary chemical marriage of sun and plant.

Gov. Rick Scott, this week, called a state of emergency for about a dozen counties. If you ask biologists and conservationists, his concern is humorous. They put the blame squarely on Scott, who has consistently loosened the oversight on the nutrient discharges by his benefactors, Big Sugar.

The emergency order does nothing to solve the problem, which Scott blamed on the Obama administration in 2016. This time, his story changes: “Bill Nelson has had 40 years to address the algae blooms and secure the federal funding to fix the dike. He didn’t care about securing results for Lake Okeechobee until an election year."

You know the story about the pot and the kettle.

If the dam goes, so do a lot of agricultural contributions. If the water is allowed to flow east and west — there are lots of ticked-off voters at the terminus of both the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers.

What to do?

It looks like the plan will be to release the filth (slowly and quietly) to the south and allowed to meander into the Everglades — where very few voters live, but lots of birds and a cacophony of critters large and small create an ecosystem seen nowhere else on the planet.

But that’s a South Florida conundrum, right?

Lisa Rinaman is the St. Johns Riverkeeper. She’s warning this week of an algal bloom of our own, up around Doctors Lake, Julington Creek and the Ortega River. The reason? Wastewater treatment plants, industrial discharge, storm water runoff, septic tanks and residential fertilizers.

She says the algae (called cyanobacteria) are always present in our water, but turn “Mr. Hyde” when fed an unnatural helping of pollutants.

She’s asking anyone who comes across it to report it to the state’s algal bloom hotline at floridadep.gov.dear/algal-bloom.

If you do, don’t touch. And, “If you’re in a boat, your wake can shake it into the air, so you can breathe it in and it can cause respiratory stress.” Swallowing it, she says, can result in long-term neurological and liver damage.

That scenario isn’t likely here — not yet. But the summer has barely begun, and the algae are feeding on a food source at already high levels in the big river.