To strengthen the South Florida coast, look upstream

摘要

Three of the most productive estuaries along the South Florida coast have recently suffered from toxic algae outbreaks that kill seagrass, harm fish and scare off visitors. It's an economic and ecological disaster and it happens all too frequently. This is a coastal problem. But this problem begins hundreds of miles inland, in Lake Okeechobee. The lake, Florida's largest, is surrounded largely by sugar farms and other agricultural lands. When it rains, excess fertilizer runs off these farms and ends up in the lake. When it rains a lot - which it often does in Florida - rising lake levels put pressure on the aging dike, threatening communities around the lake. When the lake gets too full, the pollutant-laden water is pumped from Lake Okeechobee through manmade connections to the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers to lower lake levels. The fertilizer and other runoff fuels smelly, guacamole-thick algal outbreaks once the water reaches the east and west coasts. Meanwhile, Florida Bay - an iconic fishing paradise at the tip of the state in Everglades National Park-receives too little freshwater, causing salinity to spike and seagrass to die in vast quantities, killing fish and threatening the continued health of the bay. There's one solution to all these different problems: Send freshwater south. We could make big strides towards improving the health of the South Florida coast by constructing a reservoir south of Lake Okeechobee that could be used to clean up the water and then release the clean water south to the Everglades in a way that mimics a more natural pattern - higher flows in the spring, for example. This will require constructing an above-ground storage reservoir south of Lake Okeechobee, a project known as the Everglades Agricultural Area Storage Reservoir. In this piece, we investigate why storage south of Lake Okeechobee is heralded by many to be the missing piece to solve the Everglades restoration puzzle and protect coastal communities. We also discuss where that keystone project stands currently.