Toxic blue-green algae in Lake Okeechobee draws concern WPTV News - FL Palm Beaches and Treasure Coast
803 views Jul 30, 2023
It's the weekend and the Muck Tavern on Lake Okeechobee is typically a busy place. But lately business has been a bit slow and there's a reason for it: toxic blue-green algae.
From yours -- "The Okeechobee mess, caused mainly by phosphorus-based agricultural fertilizers, festered out of the public consciousness for decades. But in recent summers the problem has become more dire. Climate change is making storms and rainfall more intense and less predictable, and last fall Hurricane Ian stirred up so much phosphorus that this summer is expected to be particularly bad.
Things get further complicated when lake levels climb so high that contaminated water must be released into canals — toward coastal cities like Fort Myers and Stuart — to protect the structural integrity of the 143-mile-long dike holding back the lake.
The coming weeks will offer a serious test.
[...]
The state and the Army Corps of Engineers are trying to reduce the toxic flows to the coasts with a controversial re-engineering plan that has been decades in the making, including building a new lake from scratch to contain and decontaminate Okeechobee’s discharges.
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Star Robinson, 55, grew up playing in and around Okeechobee. But in recent years her relationship with the lake has soured. On a morning jog in the city of Pahokee a few weeks ago, she kept at least 100 yards from the shoreline, and with good reason. Any closer and she risked choking on the lake’s lung-burning fumes.
The only activity near the water’s edge? A cluster of buzzards. “They just love the smell of death and decay,” she said.
The vapors come from rotting mats of a type of toxic algae — technically a cyanobacteria — that thrives in Okeechobee’s tea-warm water and feasts on rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and the phosphorus-rich fertilizer and manure that wash off cropland and into the lake.
[Insert: OUCH! That would be heartbreaking for someone who had played and exercised around the lake for that long.]
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The immediate dangers include lung infections and gastrointestinal distress. There are also concerns that long-term exposure could lead to organ damage and the risk of certain neurological disorders.
“This has become almost like a permanent condition,” said Gil Smart, executive director of VoteWater, a nonpartisan group pushing for a more ambitious fix. “It’s like you have spring, you have summer, and you have algae bloom season,” he said. “Like clockwork.”
Similar outbreaks have struck lakes elsewhere, including Lake Champlain, Lake Erie and Lake Tahoe. But Okeechobee is different. It is warm, flat and shallow as a backyard pool — making it more like a supersize petri dish than the wellspring of the Everglades.
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Old dike, new hope
The Herbert Hoover Dike, a grassy berm protecting lives and livelihoods.
The crisis was borne of decisions starting a century ago to tame the lake by holding back its seasonal overflows in order to drain swamps, creating rich farmland. That has transformed southern Florida into one of the most important sugar-cane-producing regions in the world.
It came at a heavy cost.
Disaster struck in 1926, when a hurricane collapsed part of the dike, drowning hundreds of people. The dike was patched, but two years later it happened again, this time killing thousands.
By the 1960s the Army Corps of Engineers proclaimed it had finally controlled the lake with what is now called the Herbert Hoover Dike, a mound of sand, rock and seashells rising a couple of stories above the table-flat landscape.
Since the dike severed the lake’s natural flow into the Everglades, the corps now operates canals to carry much of the outflows eastward to the city of Stuart on the Atlantic coast, and west to Fort Myers on the Gulf Coast.
For decades, the canals carried away lake water. Then, the algae came.
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A Manhattan-size project
Re-engineering the lake created a sugar cane kingdom . This winter the corps moved ahead with a Manhattan-size reservoir and wetlands complex. A decade or so from now, a 37-foot-high wall — holding back the new lake — will tower over sugar cane country.
The idea is that the reservoir will capture at least some of Okeechobee’s toxic outflows instead of sending them to the coasts. The 10,500-acre reservoir and the recently completed 6,500-acre artificial wetlands, designed to absorb phosphorus, are the centerpiece of a growing system of canals, gates, pumps and engineered wetlands built to clean the outflows so they can once again drift south into the Everglades as well as provide drinking water to booming South Florida. The two projects will cost roughly $4 billion.
During a recent visit to the site, Tim Harper, an engineer with the South Florida Water Management District, parked his pickup and asked his passengers to take in the endless sea of sugar cane that will one day be lake bottom. “Now, imagine 23 feet of water above you,” he said, “essentially for as far as the eye can see.”
It’s a difficult picture to conjure.
Equally challenging to grasp is the idea that the whole new lake, as big as it sounds, will fill to capacity if only six inches of Lake Okeechobee is sent its way.
[Gee...]
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Conservationists say state rules to control the flow of phosphorus from agricultural lands, by far the largest source of the pollutant, have long been poorly enforced. Yet even if fertilizer runoff stopped tomorrow, the algae threat would persist for decades or more because there is already so much phosphorus tied up in cropland soils and lake sediment.
This is one reason the path forward has included building the new reservoir and investing in phosphorus-catching artificial wetlands.
But for the moment, people like Mr. Smart of VoteWater aren’t worried about the next decade. They’re worried about the next several weeks. “Everybody keeps their fingers crossed that we won’t have a rainy summer, and that the toxins that are in the lake, stay in the lake,” he said."
Your links - "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/09/climate/florida-lake-okeechobee-algae.html
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