Gov. Rick Scott on Tuesday pledged $40 million to speed up a project intended to help clean up polluted Lake Okeechobee water that has poured into the St. Lucie River this summer, triggering toxic algae blooms, killing oysters and sea grass and angering residents and tourists.

But the governor placed most of the blame for the worsening disaster in the St. Lucie, and a similar mess in the Caloosahatchee River on the southwest coast, on the federal government.

In a letter sent Tuesday to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Scott criticized it for “inaction” on repairing the deteriorating dike around the massive lake and for failing to adequately fund water quality and Everglades restoration projects that could help reduce periodic damaging releases of lake water.

“Sadly, had the federal government met all of its obligations in maintaining the Lake Okeechobee dike system . .. the environmental conditions of this region could have been improved and the crisis in the region today would have been mitigated,” Scott wrote in a letter to Corps Brig. Gen. Donald Jackson.

Scott also called on the Corps and other federal agencies to pour $1.6 billion into South Florida environmental projects — “which you owe the state,” he wrote — under 50-50 cost-sharing agreements.

Scott made similar comments later Tuesday after touring a massive flood-control gate along the St. Lucie River where the Corps is releasing about three billion gallons a day from the rain-swollen lake to ease pressures on the aging, leaky dike. The dumping has lowered the lake by several inches in the past few weeks, but massive slugs of nutrients and sudden influx of fresh water have decimated rivers and estuaries on both coasts.

The Corps released a statement defending its work on the dike, which includes a recently completed $220 million project to shore up the most vulnerable 21-mile stretch of the massive earthen embankments and ongoing work to replace 32 culverts that more recent studies suggest are major weak points.

The Corps, said Jacksonville district commander Col. Alan Dodd, can only build what Congress authorizes and agrees to pay for.

“The Corps is disappointed in Governor Scott’s letter,” Dodd said. “However, we welcome the opportunity to better educate our partners and enhance our relationship.”

The lake releases and declining conditions in the St. Lucie and the larger Indian River Lagoon system have become a major issue along the Treasure Coast. Several hundred people showed up to wave “save our river” signs as Scott toured the St. Lucie locks.

Scott said he would ask lawmakers for $40 million next year to speed up completion of the C-44 reservoir and stormwater treatment area in western Martin County, which is intended to clean runoff before sending it to the estuary. The Corps is responsible for building the $225 million-plus project, which includes a 3,400-acre reservoir, but doesn’t currently expect to complete it until 2020.

Scott didn’t address the protesters, but environmentalists were generally pleased with Scott’s announcement — and advocacy for increased federal support for Everglades and water quality projects.

Julie Hill-Gabriel, Audubon’s director of Everglades policy, called Scott’s pledge of an additional $40 million a “positive sign.” But she also said that the C-44 was just one piece of a nearly $1 billion array of projects to store and clean up water flowing from the lake and other areas along the Indian River Lagoon. They can’t move forward without increased political support and funding from both federal and state leaders, she said.

Aerial view of the brown water of the river and inlet areas near the St. Lucie Inlet. Photo credit: Martin County BOCC.

By CURTIS MORGAN

Cmorgan@MiamiHerald.com

Lake Okeechobee keeps rising — and so do worries about an aging dike the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ranks among the most vulnerable to failure in the country.

With the massive lake swollen by a more than a month of heavy rain, the Corps cranked the flood gates open to “maximum” two weeks ago. That move infuriated residents on both coasts, coursing billions of gallons of foul nutrient-laced runoff down two rivers, but it also managed to at least slow the rate of rise.

So far, however, it hasn’t been nearly enough to reverse a troubling climb. Even with South Florida dodging the wettest remnants of Tropical Storm Dorian last week, daily storms continue to slowly push water levels up and put pressure on the 143-mile-long Herbert Hoover Dike.

The Corps held a news conference Wednesday to insist federal engineers are doing everything they can to minimize environmental impacts while protecting public safety but cautioned that nature, particularly the tropics, may play the biggest role in whether the lake will reach the dike’s danger zone over the next few months.

“We still have several months left in the wet season. We still have not reached the peak of the hurricane season,’’ said Lt. Col. Tom Greco, the Corps’ deputy district commander for South Florida. “We’re taking that very seriously.’’

Lake water levels were set to top 16 feet sometime Wednesday. That’s just six inches short of a mark that triggers the Corps to move from weekly to daily inspections of a massive but nearly 80-year-old mound built out of sand, shell, rock and peat. Despite some $300 million-plus in on-going repairs, sections remain highly vulnerable to high water and storm damage, weakened over the decades by internal erosion.

At current rates, Greco said, the lake will hit 16.5 feet in about two weeks. Unless the lake slows, projections show a 50-50 chance it could top 18 feet in coming months, which would significantly raise the risk of a potentially disastrous breach.

Emergency managers and leaders in Pahokee, Belle Glade and a string of other small towns in the shadow of the dike are monitoring water levels daily and consulting with the Corps and the South Florida Water Management District, which runs the regional flood control system.

“We’re starting to get nervous,’’ said Palm Beach County Administrator Robert Weisman. “It’s added a whole new level of risk in that area. You can’t drain water of the lake quickly enough if there is a substantial rainfall.”

The lake, which doubles as a flood control and water supply reservoir for the sugar industry, has risen 1.27 feet over the last 30 days. In the past, hurricane and tropical storms have raised lake levels twice as fast and experts are forecasting an active next few months.

Since 2006, when an alarming report by state engineering consultants pronounced the dike “a grave and imminent danger,” the Corps has shored up the dike’s most vulnerable stretch from Port Mayaca to Belle Glade with a cement-like internal dam engineers call a “curtain wall.” The agency also is overhauling or planning to beef up half of the lake’s 32 drainage culverts, considered high-risk spots.

The Corps adopted a new scheme to protect the levee by keeping a lake that doubles as a flood control and water supply reservoir at lower levels, aiming to have it rise and fall seasonally from 12.5 feet to 15.5 feet.

At its current level, the Corps considers the risk of a breach minimal and Greco said that surveys showed no significant increases in seepage. But, with the lake more than two feet above its historic average for this time of year and more than three feet above where the Corps wants it, risks will only rise through hurricane season.

According to a 2000 Corps study, the risks of a dike failure rise significantly at 17 feet. At 18 feet, the probability is 45 percent. At 20, a breach somewhere along the dike is likely, with damaging and potentially deadly flooding. Those probabilities didn’t take into account the most recent repairs, but even with those, the Corps still rates the dike among a handful of the most high-risk in the nation.

The lake has topped 18 feet a handful of times in the past. It peaked at 18.8 feet in 1995, an event that opened serious leaks at nine spots along the south and southeast shorelines, and again topped 18 feet after a string of hurricanes in 2004. In 2005, Hurricane Wilma chewed a chunk from the dike near the Pahokee airport. The Corps cited an old repair job that failed and said the dike was not at risk of a breach.

With or without storms, the Corps expects to continue dumping water down the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee Rivers for the foreseeable future.

The surge of polluted water, high in phosphorus and other agricultural chemicals, has added to local runoff that has fouled waters on both coasts, angering residents, tourists, environmentalists and local political leaders. Besides killing oysters and sea grass, the dumping has triggered a toxic algae bloom in the St. Lucie River and warnings from health authorities to stay out of the water.

State agencies on Wednesday released a joint statement saying that state and local governments had already spent more than a half-billion dollars to reduce pollution impacts from local runoff and were looking for solutions to address “complex environmental and public health issues’’ that balanced flood control, water quality and water supply needs

Greco said the Corps was working with water managers and state agencies for potential solutions, including putting more water into already brimming Everglades water conservation areas, but public safety concerns about the dike have forced dumping “that isn’t popular but is necessary.”

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/08/07/v-fullstory/3549066/despite-lake-okeechobee-dumping.html#storylink=cpy

It’s happening again, and it’s bad. Billions of gallons of foul brown water are being flushed into two South Florida rivers to lower Lake Okeechobee and protect the Herbert Hoover Dike during hurricane season.

Two lovely estuary systems, the Caloosahatchee River in Southwest Florida and the St. Lucie in the Southeast, are being assaulted by unwelcome pollution.

These two systems have suffered inundations before, of course, but there is a solution that could eventually give these rivers a respite.

It’s a costly solution, to be sure, but then so is every remedy to clean up and restore the Everglades, the state’s magnificent River of Grass. Lake Okeechobee should drain south into the Glades, but it’s so polluted by agriculture and urban runoff — phosphorous, nitrogen and other poisons — that it would literally be a state crime to send the water directly south.

To its credit, the state built a billion-dollar network of marshes to clean lake runoff before sending it southward, but even at that, there still isn’t enough storage capacity to contain so much spillover.

So instead, the U.S. Corps of Engineers must divert the water east and west when the lake level rises to flood stage. July’s record rainfall forced the Corps to open the gates. Pictures of nasty brown water gushing into the two rivers would make anybody cringe.

The solution is an ambitious $2.2 billion draft plan being negotiated by the Corps and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection that would clean up some lake water and restore historic water flows to the Central Everglades. The negotiations are supposed to wrap up any day now, which is good news. The plan must be formalized in time to be included for authorization in a congressional civil-works bill set to be voted on this year. If the plan isn’t completed and sent to Congress now, years could pass before presenting it again. So the project must be done this year, period.

The River Coalition — civic, environmental and business groups that formed after a 1998 inundation in the St. Lucie — is pushing negotiators to conclude talks and get the ball rolling in Congress. The Everglades Foundation is also urging the DEP, the Corps and various stakeholders to wrap up, pointing out that any plan authorized this year could be revised later, if needed.

Sometimes it seems as if there is no end in sight for making reparations for all the egregious injuries done to our unique Everglades ecosystem. And every element of the ambitious, expensive restoration plan has assumed a cloak of urgency in recent years.

Lake Okeechobee water dumping alternatives explored

With Lake Okeechobee two feet too high and still rising after a month of heavy rain and far-off Tropical Storm Dorian posing a potential but highly uncertain threat, federal engineers on Thursday cranked opened the flood gates on the big lake, spilling tens of billions of gallons of polluted water down rivers on both coasts.

The “maximized” releases are intended to protect public safety, making room for flood waters and easing pressure on the aging, vulnerable Herbert Hoover Dike. The lake remained more than a foot below the danger zone where risks of leaks, erosion or even potentially catastrophic breaches to the massive levee begin to sharply rise. But Dorian or some other future tropical deluge could quickly fill that gap as South Florida enters the peak of the hurricane season.

“It is imperative that we take additional measures to control the rise of the lake to ensure we have enough storage capacity,’’ said Col. Alan Dodd, commander of the U.S. Army Crops of Engineers’ Jacksonville District.

But stepped-up dumping flow spells an expanding environmental disaster for once-rich estuaries on both sides of the state: the Caloosahatchee River on the southwest coast and the St. Lucie River on the southeast. Sprawling black plumes already foul both rivers, a brew produced by local storm runoff but worsened by weeks of steadily increasing dumping of lake water laced with farm and yard nutrients like phosphorous, nitrogen, animal waste and silt.

In the St. Lucie, oysters are shriveling, sea grass beds are withering and waste-related bacteria levels have soared so high that Martin County health authorities have posted signs warning people not to swim in the river. It’s a mess that makes an unrelated algae bloom in Biscayne Bay appear relatively benign.

For frustrated residents, river advocated and environmentalists, it’s dirty water déjà vu.

Both rivers, which double as relief valves for Lake Okeechobee in the region’s flood-control system, have been repeatedly pounded by lake dump over the last few decades. The St. Lucie, about 50 miles north of West Palm Beach, has been hammered hardest — most recently and destructively after the hectic 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons repeatedly filled Lake Okeechobee.

Jacqui Thurlow-Lippisch, a commissioner for Sewall’s Point, an upscale enclave near the mouth of the St. Lucie inlet, has regularly flown in her husband’s plane to photograph impacts that have spread though much of the Indian River Lagoon complex, from Fort Pierce to south of Stuart.

“This is just ridiculous for black water to be running through our estuaries in front of our homes where we play and fish,’’ said Thurlow-Lippisch. “I am angry at my government and I am part of the government. There is no excuse for this to keep happening.’’

The Corps, which co-manages the lake and regional flood-control system with the South Florida Water Management District, insists the agencies are doing everything they can with an outdated regional drainage system periodically overwhelmed by South Florida’s extreme weather. When it rains like it has so far in July, approaching double the typical amounts in some areas, the lake can rise much faster than the Corps can lower it.

Easing South Florida flooding concerns means sending a bigger polluting flush of Lake Okeechobee water toward the already-suffering coast.

Above-normal July rains prompted the Army Corps of Engineers on Friday to increase the amount of water being drained from Lake Okeechobee west to the Caloosahatchee River and east to the St. Lucie River.

The Army Corps since May has been dumping billions of gallons of lake water through the rivers and out to sea to ease the strain on Lake Okeechobee's 70-year-old dike — considered one of the country's most at-risk of failing.

But the lake draining that helps flood control also wastes water that could be needed to boost South Florida water supplies when dry weather returns. And of greater concern now for the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie estuaries, the prolonged dumping from the lake is fouling coastal water quality and killing marine habitat. That threatens fishing grounds and can make waterways unsafe for swimming.

"It is a damaging, devastating, horrible effect," said Mark Perry, executive director of the Florida Oceanographic Society in Stuart. "We are expecting [environmental] damage all across the board."

The increased Lake Okeechobee water releases could drain up to 6 billion gallons per day of lake water, enough to fill more than 9,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Lake Okeechobee on Friday had risen to 15.24 above sea level, about 3 feet higher than this time last year.

The Army Corps tries to keep lake levels between 12.5 feet and 15.5 feet, both for the environmental health of the lake and to protect the dike. The dike is in the midst of a decades-long rehab, the initial phases of which are expected to cost $750 million.

Rising lake levels increase the risk of erosion in the lake's earthen dike, which can lead to a breach.

"We are hopeful these larger [lake] releases will allow us to stabilize the rising lake before we have to maximize flows throughout the system," said Jorge Tous, the Army Corps' chief of water management for Florida.

Lake water being dumped into the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers is a man-made consequence of the vast flood-control system aimed at keeping South Florida dry.

Water once naturally overlapped Lake Okeechobee's southern rim, flowing south in shallow sheets that replenished the Everglades.

But then farming and development got in the way, leading to the creation of the 143-mile-long Herbert Hoover Dike that now encircles the lake. Drainage canals were added to send lake water to the coast.

In addition to threatening the dike, high water can have damaging environmental consequences for the lake — drowning the aquatic plants that provide vital wildlife habitat and fishing grounds.

Yet high-volume, prolonged releases of lake water into the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers throw off the delicate balance of fresh and salt water in the estuaries. They also bring an infusion of pollutants and cloud the water along the coast.

That damaging combination can kill off oyster beds and sea grasses — vital habitat for fish, manatees and other marine life. The lake releases are already leading to algae blooms that can lead to fish kills and even make contact with the water harmful to people.

Aside from beefing up the dike, long-term help to avoid releasing lake water to the coast involves building more of the water storage and treatment areas that are part of backlogged Everglades restoration plans.

Until then, the rainy-season lake releases are expected to continue.

"It's a major problem right now because we are in the early part of tropical storm season," Perry said. "Where's our protection?"

abreid@tribune.com, 561-228-5504 or Twitter @abreidnews

Copyright © 2013, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

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