There has recently been a great deal of public debate regarding the management of Lake Okeechobee’s water levels and the corresponding effect on natural systems and water supplies in South Florida.
The management of the Lake is critical to both the restoration of the Everglades and the recharge of the coastal aquifers that provide drinking water for nearly 7 million people living in southeast Florida. While there are varying opinions on the best way forward, it is important that we all focus on the technical solutions to these large, complex water resource problems.
Lake Okeechobee has long served as a backup source of supplemental water for the communities along the lower east coast of South Florida during extended droughts. Were it not for this source of critical supply, extensive droughts could force groundwater levels down, thereby allowing saltwater from the Atlantic Ocean to seep into the freshwater aquifers, ultimately contaminating the utility wellfields that provide clean, fresh water to our homes and businesses.
The existing water resource management system that was developed over 70 years ago has allowed the communities, businesses, and farms in South Florida to flourish. However it came with a cost; the extensive system of canals, levees and flood control structures bifurcated the natural Everglades, separating it from Lake Okeechobee, which deprived the Everglades ecosystems of water and shunted damaging quantities of excess water into the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie estuaries.
To repair this unintentional ecological damage, a plan was needed to reverse the man-made manipulation of water and return the remaining portion of the Everglades to the natural, seasonal fluctuations of water levels needed to support the wetland vegetation and wildlife that made the Everglades the iconic symbol of natural systems.
Returning the southerly seasonal flow of water from Lake Okeechobee to the Everglades would also help manage Lake levels in a more natural ecological range and reduce the tendency for harmful discharges to the estuaries.
The blueprint to address this enormous task was completed in 2000 and is known as the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, or by its acronym; CERP.
It proposed a series of massive water storage and conveyance projects that were designed to provide the right quantity of water at the right timing, distribution, and quality to adequately serve the natural system needs.
In this Plan, there were two fundamental promises made as a consensus solution. The first was that any water made available by the projects for the purpose of ecological restoration would be legally ‘reserved’ for the environment; protecting this water from being permitted away to meet some future human water need. The second promise was that no source of water legally permitted to a user at the time CERP was authorized by Congress, would be transferred to another use without a replacement source being made available.
This second promise was known in federal law as the ‘Savings Clause.’ These two fundamental provisions served as the basis for agreement between the myriad of interest groups who debated and developed the consensus solution for Everglades Restoration.
These provisions provided a level of trust that no existing permitted water user would be harmed by Everglades Restoration and that water intended to benefit the environment would be preserved in perpetuity for that purpose.
That same level of trust should be maintained as future decisions are being made.
Today, there is a dispute over the relevance of these promises as the very first in a series of CERP water storage reservoirs comes online corresponding with the completion of the rehabilitation of the earthen dike surrounding Lake Okeechobee.
These individual systems will arguably work together in a closely coordinated manner to provide the Everglades the water it badly needs, while protecting the ecology of the Lake and reducing damaging discharges to the coastal estuaries.
It stands to reason that in achieving these critically important environmental goals through adherence to the Savings Clause, we also ensure that the human water supply remains safe, available, and abundant for its many purposes long into the future.
Tommy B. Strowd, P.E. is Executive Director of the Lake Worth Drainage District, and previously served as Assistant Executive Director of Operations, Maintenance & Construction for the South Florida Water Management District. Strowd has more than 35 years of experience in civil, environmental and water resource engineering in the public and private sectors.
