PalmBeachPost.com

No joy despite rain

By STACEY SINGER

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Monday, June 18, 2007

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2007/06/18/m1a_HOWBAD_0618.html

After three months of browning sod, the grass is green again.

But don't be fooled. This has been more than a lawn-parching drought.

It has been seven months since the Kissimmee Valley has sent water to Lake Okeechobee. While rainfall has been ample along the coast in June, it still hasn't relieved the lake, the most important backup water supply in South Florida.

Despite a good month of coastal rain, Terrie Bates worries about Lake O, and she worries about next year.

Bates manages the emergency operation at the South Florida Water Management District. She says the water shortage of '07 could easily become the water shortage of '08, and so she prepares for simultaneous summer emergencies — damaging hurricanes and continued historic lows for Lake Okeechobee.

"We've never been at this point before," Bates says, gesturing toward a wall chart whose plunging red line evokes the stock-market crash of 1929. It shows how dramatically Lake Okeechobee has shrunken since Nov. 1, 2005. June rainfall has done little to move the line upward.

Another chart sits in her lap, projecting the odds that the lake will be in the danger zone next year. That chart suggests that without above-average rain this summer and fall, Lake Okeechobee could hit new record lows.

"I feel like we still have a ways to go," Bates says. "You're just continually watching that graph, and it just goes down, and down, and down."

More than 6 million people depend on the fragile freshwater system that Bates helps manage. It stretches from Orlando's Kissimmee Valley, southward to Lake Okeechobee, through the Everglades and into Florida Bay.

The entire region has been affected by the lake's troubles. Key indicators have seen a cascade of firsts:

Z West Palm Beach was so close to losing its water supply in May that recycled, highly treated sewage water was poured onto its western well field, then pumped toward the lakes that provide its drinking water.

Z Lake Worth and Lantana temporarily shut down eastern drinking water wells, fearing saltwater intrusion. Monitoring wells from Jupiter to Boca Raton have shown rising salt levels. In a radical move, district managers decided to send water that might have gone to West Palm Beach, Indian Trails, the Lake Worth Drainage District and others to the coastal waterways in hopes that the weight would help send the salt water downward, keeping it from contaminating the fresh water in the aquifer.

"We've never done that before," Bates says. "It seems to be helping."

Z The water district governing board announced Thursday that it plans to impose year-round restrictions next month throughout South Florida that would limit landscape watering to three days a week — whether there's a drought or not. Such restrictions now only are in place in Lee and Collier counties where water has been in short supply for years.

Z Lake Okeechobee hit its lowest point in history on June 1 at 8.89 feet, leaving its already struggling tourist industry high and dry. It crept to 8.9 feet last week — still 4 feet below average — and could hit a new low any day.

How dry has it been? So dry that ancient artifacts and bones of long-gone tribes have emerged as Lake Okeechobee's water recedes. Unable to launch boats, the lake's neighbors watched aghast as 30,000 acres of drying lake bed actually caught fire.

And in a cruel twist that novelist John Steinbeck might have scripted, multimillion-dollar injection wells, designed to save storm water for dry times, proved useless in West Palm Beach and Delray Beach. The injected water sat for years in the aquifer, mixing with arsenic and radioactive isotopes drawn out of the rock. When it was needed most, the emergency water proved too poisonous to use.

As land grew parched, cattle ranchers, sugar growers, nursery operators, well diggers, charter boat captains, gardeners, birdwatchers and school children all felt the effects.

Public water slides were closed. Fountains were shut off. Canoeing was discouraged as parched alligators grew too friendly.

Thousands of cattle were sent prematurely to slaughter. The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services estimates direct cattle, sugar and other crop losses at about $525 million. If economic impact multipliers are applied, losses could reach $1.1 billion.

An estimated 25,000 head of cattle statewide were thinned because of the drought, says state analyst Dan Sleep.

Droughts in South Florida occur once every 10 years on average. But the population never has been so large as during this one. Considering the consequences so far, is this how nature says stop?

Water district meteorologist Eric Swartz puts it bluntly: "If there's a finite amount of water, and the population continues to grow, in theory we could have a drought every year."

In the 1930s, when about 52,000 people lived in Palm Beach County, droughts were not the problem they are today. Indeed, flood control was the over-arching concern.

An elaborate dike was devised to contain Lake Okeechobee after deadly flooding from a 1928 hurricane. Over subsequent decades, 1,700 miles of canals, lakes and pumping stations were installed to dispatch water to sea and convert swamps to farmland and subdivisions.

In 2007, with its population at 1.3 million, Palm Beach County seems tapped. Plans to capture the water so painstakingly sent to sea are years and billions of dollars away.

While still affected by drought, the Treasure Coast is much less in danger. It relies less on Lake Okeechobee and taps its water from a different, less-stressed aquifer.

Florida is inundated by wetlands, speckled with lakes and rivers. Yet on a regular basis, Florida's cycle of wet and dry seasons turns extreme — and always will.

"It's the dips that expose the vulnerabilities," Swartz says.

Drought? Yes. But while the consequences have been unprecedented, it's not the worst drought on record.

The worst was 18 months between November 1999 and April 2001, Swartz said. Less than 48 inches of rain fell on average, district wide. Before that came 1962, when 49.24 inches fell.

This drought has brought 49.4 inches of rain, but most of it fell along the coast, in the regions least in need. An average 52 inches of rain falls on the system each year, district-wide.

Bates points again to what folks at the district call the Spaghetti Map. It's a tracking map water managers use to predict the future levels of Lake Okeechobee — a barometer of the water system's health. It pulls from 41 years of lake and rainfall records to predict what various scenarios would mean for Lake Okeechobee, and by extension, the area's water supply.

Bates sees much reason for caution.

There's an outside chance that the district could be pumping water out to sea by November — if this summer's storms drench the region with the most rain seen since the 1960s.

Right now, coastal wells are doing much better. But with average rainfall, projections suggest the lake would not reach an acceptable level until early next year.

A slim worst-case: that rainfall is significantly less than expected in July, August and September, and the lake level falls to around 7 feet, the point where sugar cane growers no longer can pump water from the lake.

"Having fires burn through (Everglades) muck that has taken hundreds of years to accumulate," Bates says. "That's a huge concern."

Saltwater intrusion in wells, moratoriums on building, massive investments in alternative water supplies that send water bills doubling or tripling, forcing people to drink recycled sewage water all the time?

All remain concerns for the region's future. It can be hard to grasp when the grass is green again. But far from population centers, the lake still suffers.

"The first priority is the public water supply — the public health and safety," Bates says. "The priority has got to be protection of the resource.