Monday, September 03, 2007
Editorial
Palm Beach County likens the vast Everglades Agricultural Area to a bowl. Water drained from Lake Okeechobee, instead of following its historic flow to the Everglades, would flood the vast sugar cane fields in the county's western half.
So, according to a county draft report on the impact of rock mining, a natural flowway to carry excess lake water south wouldn't work. And that, the report says, is one reason why rock-mining wouldn't interfere with Everglades restoration.
But that's far too narrow a view. The flowway, which was dismissed in a cursory 1994 review, never has been thoroughly studied. And the alternative to the flowway in the $10.9''billion Everglades restoration plan is 333 underground storage wells, a concept that remains unproven and never may work.
Agencies that manage the water system say they need storage, not a flowway. The most prominent above-ground storage in Palm Beach County, the former Talisman Sugar property south of Lake Okeechobee, is inadequate, even at 32,000 acres. Water managers don't know where they'll get more. Likewise, they don't know where more mines will be built.
There's been a push for mining since 2005, a year before a federal judge stopped work at some rock mines in Miami-Dade County. U.S. Sugar got county approval last year for a 5,400-acre mine west of Wellington and has applied for a 7,000-acre mine south of the lake.
Despite the EAA's bowl shape, a man-made flowway could carry water south from the lake between the Miami and New River canals. The flowway is gaining support from environmentalists because releasing water south would reduce damaging lake discharges to the St. Lucie River in Martin County and the Caloosahatchee River on Florida's west coast. Even if more storage is the answer, public agencies should make sure that the mines don't occupy land needed to restore the Everglades. Instead, water managers tell Palm Beach County that there's no current plan to use the land. That's a simplistic answer to the wrong question.
Further, executive directors of the South Florida Water Management District damage efforts to limit mining. First Henry Dean and now Carol Wehle have issued letters to justify U.S. Sugar's plans. The district needs storage, Ms. Wehle wrote in March, and rock mines "could" meet that need sometime in the future. "Consequently, the district would support proposals for rock mining." Did board members approve that statement? Did district engineers study mining's effect on underground water?
The state left Palm Beach County to deal alone with rock mining last year, when Jeb Bush's administration reneged on a promise to plan the future of the Everglades Agriculture Area after sugar cane. The eagerness with which growers are embracing mining shows that the post-sugar cane era is here. The planning needs to catch up.
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Comments
By PO Saunders
Sep 3, 2007 8:44 AM | Link to this
The SFWMD is controlled by commercial stakeholders and has a very shady history. The same is true of the PB Comission. Their engineering consultants have a strong financial incentive to support their views.
This editorial's call for studies regarding the effect of mines on groundwater is certainly well taken. This is about limerock for development and export and the "Consultants" can't be trusted. Limerock is a wonderful filter and mine pits are not. Worse, as the Glades is turned into ponds, the vegetation that protects the backside of developed South Florida is removed. This is exactly what happened in New Orleans. Destroying protective vegetation is crazy! This is not even an "environmental" issue ... It's pure common sense.