No one ever came that far south — swarms of mosquitoes were said to suffocate cattle — but the canals widened. And as they expanded, the coast and marshes where crocodiles nest and migrating birds refuel for transcontinental flights started collapsing like a sandcastle pounded by waves.

Wildlife managers are now in a race. The more saltwater flows into marshes, the faster they die. And the faster marshes die, the more damaging nutrients from the dead sedge and other vegetation wash into the bay.

Scientists think they have a fix. Simply plug the canals. But getting money to repair a problem accessible only by boat — and easily lost in the long list of Everglades restoration projects — has been tough. Three years ago Everglades National Park constructed $7 million dams to plug the two most damaging canals using federal stimulus grants. Now, tired of waiting for work to continue, the nonprofit Everglades Foundation has supplied $143,000 to the park service, half the cost of completing an environmental assessment needed before more money — an estimated $10 million — can be sought to plug four smaller canals.

“With the canals plugged, we may not be able to stop” the damage, said acting park superintendent Bob Krumenaker. “But we can slow down the action and make the system more resilient for a considerably longer time.”

As early as the 1950s, wildlife managers spotted trouble at the two main canals, the East Cape and Homestead. Originally dug only 15 to 20 feet wide, the canals broadened to 10 times their width with the constant scouring by tides. Workers erected earthen dams to stop the canals from widening. But hurricanes and erosion washed away the dams. About 2005, damage started increasing exponentially, Frezza said.

“Even in the last three years the rate water is moving in and out is truly astonishing,” said Carol Mitchell, deputy science director at Everglades and Dry Tortugas National Parks.

At the Raulerson Brothers Canal at the western tip of Lake Ingraham, water rushes down the canal at low tide in white-capped rapids. One morning last month, Tom Van Lent, the director of science and policy at the Everglades Foundation, pointed to three feet of exposed grass and mangrove roots, a sign of just how quickly the marsh has shrunk “like letting air out of a mattress.” A side creek that Van Lent said was impassable five years ago sends water gushing out.

Scientists fear that all the nutrients washing out of the dying marsh could profoundly damage the bay. In 1992, when a massive algae bloom turned much of Florida Bay into a smelly, slimy dead zone, scientists believe the trigger was nutrient run-off. In recent years, the amount of algae-feeding nutrients in Lake Ingraham has remained much higher than in the Everglades to the north.

“We’ll never know what triggers an algae bloom,” Van Lent said. “But adding nutrients to Florida Bay is not a good thing.”

On the flip side, sediment carried by incoming tides over the last 30 years has dramatically changed Lake Ingraham. Once a freshwater lake, it is now salty and filled with acres of barren mud flats. Audubon’s Frezza said the food chain has shrunk, with small fish declining and larger fish and seabirds going elsewhere to hunt.

“It’s not quite the dead sea, but it’s pretty bad,” Van Lent said.

Park officials hope to complete the environmental assessment within the next 18 months, Krumenaker said. The assessment will look at whether plugging the four remaining canals — the Raulerson, East Side Creek, Slagle’s Ditch and House Ditch — can slow the process and improve water quality. Once the assessment is complete, the park hopes to begin the arduous process of finding money, teaming up with nonprofits to go after grants.

The tides are rising this week in South Beach, and everyone’s watching to see whether newly installed pumps will control the flooding.

During this week’s king tide, city officials hope to avoid the familiar scenes of people wading in ankle-deep waters and cars splashing down Alton Road and West Avenue.

Officials are banking on their $15 million investment in stormwater pumps to mitigate this year’s highest high tides, which are expected to arrive Wednesday and Thursday, according to the National Weather Service. The projected high tides will be around 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. and are supposed to reach about 3½ feet both days. Areas on the west side of South Beach start to flood at around 3 feet.

Freshly installed pump stations are already working at 10th and 14th streets along West Avenue, as well as two updated pumps in Sunset Harbor. Temporary pumps at Fifth Street should also help stem the tide, and the city plans to build another permanent pump at Sixth and West within the next six months.

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All of this, according to city engineer Bruce Mowry, is expected to minimize flooding — resulting in less standing water for shorter times.

He emphasized that these are short-term solutions when considering a larger and far-reaching issue of sea level rise. Since the westernmost swath of South Beach sits low, he said, the area will essentially be ground zero.

“This is the biggest area impacted by sea level rise,” he said.

The $15 million spent so far is the first fraction of the $500 million the city plans to spend during the next five years on 58 pumps up and down the Beach. The Florida Department of Transportation also plans to install pumps at 10th and 14th streets and Alton Road. The construction that has plagued Alton all year — expected to wrap up before the end of the year — has been to improve drainage.

The new pump systems are connected to the new drainage infrastructure under Alton, so conditions are expected to be better there, as well.

Public works director Eric Carpenter said that with the pump projects, the city is updating infrastructure that is at least 50 years old. City leaders hope they will provide relief for 30 to 40 years, but all agree the long-term strategy will have to include revamping the building code to construct buildings higher off the ground, making roads higher and constructing a taller seawall.

Mayor Philip Levine said the conversation would continue for years on how exactly to prepare the Beach for rising waters.

“We know the questions,” he said. “But don’t have all the answers.”

The tide is high

The king tide occurs when the sun and moon align in a such a way that their gravity tugs at earth’s water enough to create the highest of high tides.

In Miami Beach, the highest elevations run along the sandy beaches, and the lowest lands lie to the west, in areas that used to be mangroves. In a way, a natural event like the king tide simply sends this dense, built-out section of land back to the state Mother Nature intended it to be.

The king tide does not send water careening over the western seawall from Biscayne Bay, but it raises the tide high enough that it seeps into the drains underneath the city through Florida’s porous soil and limestone.

“It’s like water flowing through a bunch of marbles,” Mowry said.

The water then rises through the storm drains and, if there is enough of it, floods the streets. Before the current upgrades, faulty caps on the pipes where the water comes out led to either backed up drains behind jammed caps or water rushing back up into the drains because the caps were gone.

And rainfall always makes matters worse.

The new pumps are designed to collect the water, filter it and push it out to Biscayne Bay. Special valves prevent it from flowing back.

It might not sound logical to pump water back into the bay that is causing the flooding, but Mowry explained that the seepage is slower than the pumps, each of which can move about 14,000 gallons per minute. The water removed from the streets is not enough to raise the level of the bay any more than the king tide already has.

A key factor of the new pump system is the valve that prevents water from rushing back in through the release point.

“It’s like a trap door,” Levine said. “The water goes out one way, and it can’t come back.”

During this week’s king tide, the city estimates it will be able to pump about 50,000 gallons a minute, or the equivalent of three to four swimming pools. It could still take time to drain a flooded street, particularly if rainwater adds to the problem, but officials hope to see less standing water for a shorter amount of time this year.

“We’re hoping people don’t have to use sandbags this year,” he said.

If people do have problems, they are being encouraged to report any flooding they see to the city by calling 305-604-2489 or using the city’s mobile app, Miami Beach e-Gov.

Residents and politicians alike will have their eyes on the Beach this week to see whether the city’s early efforts relieve the problem.

Last week, U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., announced that he was bringing a contingent of senators to South Florida on Thursday to see how the streets around Las Olas Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale flood during the king tide. He said he would not visit Alton Road, where he believes the street will be dry thanks to the new pumps.

“I think the pumps are going to be so effective that you won’t have the visual of the water sloshing around on Alton Road,” he told the Miami Herald after delivering a speech at Jungle Island.

Some local students are also watching closely.

Over the last 18 months, foundation scientists have met with government officials, business leaders and other scientists to develop a criteria for the competition, said Maurice Ferre, a foundation board member who is chairing the challenge.

Calling it “one of the world’s most daunting environmental problems,” the group focused on phosphorous that is part of a soup of run-off from farms and yards that threatens water around the country. South Florida has been particularly vulnerable from dirty water in Lake Okeechobee, the chief source of fresh water to the Everglades. Last summer, water flowing east and west from the lake turned the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers a bright emerald green as phosphorous-fed, fish-killing algae bloomed.

The competition took on broader urgency this summer when algae bloomed in Lake Erie, shutting off water to a half million residents in Toledo, Eikenberg said. On Wednesday, the foundation plans to stage a formal press conference in Chicago.

Over the years, Florida has fought to control phosphorous, enacting a series of laws and spending more than a billion dollars on a vast series of artificial marshes to scrub the pollutant from water flowing into the Glades. The sugar industry, the source of much of the pollution, has dramatically reduced its fertilizer use over the last decades but tons of phosphorus still flow every year into drainage canals with storm run-off.

Solving the phosphorous riddle, “is really the right idea because farm fertilizer is such a pestilence on the state,” said David Guest, a managing attorney for Earth Justice, which sued the South Florida Water Management District to halt the practice of “back-pumping” storm water into Lake Okeechobee.

The competition was split into phases designed to assess the pollution-reducing potential of proposals, said foundation chief scientist G. Melodie Naja, who will oversee research and help convene an independent panel of scientists to review work. Competitors will have to first prove the success of their work in the lab. Next, results must be proven on a larger scale in a swimming pool. The final phase will test phosphate reduction in the Kissimmee River, a major tributary adding to lake pollution.

The goal, Naja said, is to reduce phosphorous in water to 40 parts per billion. Concentrations in the Kissimmee River now run about six to nine times higher, she said.

“We want to see if we can clean water on a huge scale,” she said.

While reducing phosphorous has been one of the Everglades Foundation’s main missions, the prize also takes into account a growing global shortage of phosphate rock, the main ingredient in phosphorous. World supplies are now controlled by just a few countries — China, South Africa, Jordan, Morocco and the U.S. A 2010 report cited by the Everglades Foundation warned of a pending crisis.

In addition to the $10 million grand prize, the foundation also hopes to award smaller prizes totaling $1 million leading up to the 2022 award.

While awarding prizes for excellence in science or the arts is nothing new, tailoring awards to achieve certain goals has become a uniquely 21st century tool to spur innovation. Since 1991, about 80 percent of prizes totaling more than $375 million have been designed to achieve a specific innovation rather than recognizing general excellence, according to a 2009 study by the international management firm McKinsey & Company.

The study found competitions have generally shifted away from achievement in arts and humanities to science, engineering, aviation, space and the environment, driven in part by a pool of new philanthropists intent on achieving social goals. Mobilizing participants, who often spend their own money in pursuit of the prize, ultimately creates, the study found, “a powerful instrument of change.”

Naja said she is confident the Everglades challenge will draw competitors since the group already receives frequent inquiries from people claiming to be able to reduce phosphorous.

The House passed the Water Resources Reform and Development Act on Tuesday, and the Senate could vote on it later this week.

The bipartisan legislation authorizes over $1.8 billion for four Everglades projects, along with 30 other water projects nationwide. It's been seven years since Congress last considered a similar bill.

When a massive, multibillion-dollar Everglades restoration plan was approved in 2000, Congress took up water projects bills every two years. Few of the roughly 60 projects originally included in that plan have been authorized for federal funding.

Some of the original projects have been absorbed into a $1.9 billion Central Everglades Planning Project that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is reviewing. Environmental advocates had hoped it would be included in this water projects bill so that it wouldn't languish for years without authorization.

The advocates say the lag between authorization bills and federal bureaucracy in project planning forces the state to shoulder more of the funding burden up front and keeps Everglades restoration to incremental progress.

"In order to have more things to work on, we needed this bill," said Julie Hill-Gabriel, director of Everglades policy for Audubon Florida.

"There has to be a more efficient way of doing things," she added.

In general, the state and the federal government each pay half the cost of Everglades restoration projects.

http://www.ocala.com/article/20140521/WIRE/140529944?Title=Advocates-want-more-frequent-federal-water-bills-