http://www.palmbeachpost.com/hp/content/local_news/epaper/2007/05/09/0510WATER.html
Water managers
said Wednesday they're speeding ahead with $11 million worth of projects to
scrape noxious muck from Lake Okeechobee, seizing on one of the ecological
bright spots of the region's shriveling drought.
The work is aimed
at gouging a total of 3.8 million cubic yards of muck from various spots around
the lake - approximately enough to bury the
At the same time,
the projects will remove a little less than 1 percent of the polluting
phosphorus coating the 730-square-mile lake's bottom. And it will unclog some
navigation canals near
The projects are
possible because 18 months of abnormally dry weather have dropped the lake to
within 4.5 inches of its all-time record low water level. That means much of
the lake's bottom is now dry, muddy beach - accessible to trucks and
bulldozers, not boats.
What might spoil
the water managers' plans? For one thing, rain might make the lake start rising
again, even though that would ease their worries about the drought.
"We'll either
run out of time or we'll run out of money," said Susan Gray, deputy
director of watershed management at the South Florida Water Management
District. But for now, she said, the drought "has given us a tremendous
opportunity." The district is carrying out the projects in cooperation
with agencies such as the state Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission,
The lake once had
a sandy bottom, but decades of manure- and fertilizer-laden runoff have left it
coated with about 300 million cubic yards of muck and more than 30,000 tons of
phosphorus. The muck smothers potential plant habitat, and the phosphorus
sloshes around the lake in stormy weather, worsening the lake's pollution woes.
The 2004 and 2005
hurricanes spread the muck even further. Only recently has the lake shown signs
of recovering from the ecological damage that Hurricane Wilma wreaked in October 2005, Gray told the board.