Water is the thing that quite literally puts Florida on the map. It surrounds us on three sides and bubbles up out of the ground flowing through our lives north, south, east and west. We drink it, we explore it, we play in it and get around on it, we fish it, we paint it, we love it while we sit and watch it.
It also is the key to our economic future, often at the center of the delicate balancing act between economic development and environmental preservation. A significant portion of Florida’s surface waters is “impaired” – at least in legal/technical terms – and the cost of mitigating the problem to ensure the state’s future is big and getting bigger. Multiple projects working or planned, all in the billions of dollars and all designed to restore our state’s water.
All of which raises an age-old conundrum: Given that we are talking billions of dollars, can we really afford to improve water quality and, conversely, can we afford not to?
The numbers can be daunting. According to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s 2014 Water Quality Assessment of Florida “there are 54,836 miles of rivers and streams; 49,128 miles of canals and ditches; 2,390 square miles of lakes, reservoirs, and ponds; 3,625 square miles of estuaries and coastal waters; and more than 1,000 springs in the state.”
Add to that more than 7,000 square miles of inland waters and 17,000-plus square miles of freshwater and tidal wetlands. In 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency published the Florida Water Quality Assessment Report indicating more than 80 percent of our rivers, streams, lakes, reservoirs, ponds, bays and estuaries are impaired.
If surface water contains enough of a particular pollutant to exceed the quality standards that protect human health and aquatic life, that water body is said to be impaired. The individual pollutants range from excess nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus to bacteria, pesticides, acids, toxins and mercury.
No doubt 80 percent seems like a lot, especially in so many different settings. It would seem a lot easier if there was just one big polluted lake that needed cleaning up. The reality is that we are looking at diverse settings with varying degrees of impairment (some minimally, some very seriously) and subtle interlocking processes in which the law of unintended consequence can often operate in opposition to the best laid plans.
Some of the plans, as originally conceived were very good: Improved transportation corridors, flood prevention and the creation of expansive and fertile agricultural lands. Unfortunately, those plans were not aligned with the intended work of Florida’s “River of Grass” – the Everglades.
In its natural state the Everglades was a massive connected ecosystem that moved water unlike most rivers moving in a channel, but more like a shallow sheet over the entire southern peninsula. Everglades Foundation Wetland Ecologist Dr. Stephen E. Davis III says the Everglades “served as a water management system to the nth degree, accepting five feet of annual rainfall, storing it and slowly moving it through the River of Grass into the Florida Bay, all while recharging the Biscayne Aquifer.”
Compartmentalization has hurt the Glades. The construction of the Tamiami Trail in the 1920s was the first project to block the flow from Lake Okeechobee to the Florida Bay. After storm surge during the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane (the second deadliest in U.S. history) sloshed over the southern rim of the lake, killing thousands, the Herbert Hoover Dike was constructed as a flood control measure, further limiting the flow.
The most serious blow, though, came in 1948 with the Central & South Florida Project. Intended to control the water for a population in peril from flooding, the projects dikes, levees and flood control canals sealed the fate of the Everglades blocking the flow south (and east) from Lake Okeechobee forever. The Biscayne Aquifer, the Everglades and the Florida Bay were left without the freshwater they needed.
So, if not lazily down the southern peninsula in a shallow sheet of life-giving water, where does five feet of rain go every year? Through Herculean water management efforts, east out of Okeechobee to the St. Lucie River and into the Indian River Lagoon and Atlantic Ocean or west out the Caloosahatchee River into San Carlos Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.
Previously pristine Florida waterways are now something akin to a giant drain pipe for Lake Okeechobee. And, as we all know, not everything that goes down the drain is nice.
Lake Okeechobee has suffered as a result. The lake is immense and its enormity has always meant it takes more than its fair share of what’s thrown away. Pesticides, fertilizers, urban runoff and industrial effluent are just part of the problem.
If water could flow south unimpeded out of Okeechobee across the Glades, nature’s wetland pollution processes would remove much of what’s nasty and leave cleaner water to continue its trek south. But compartmentalization means the impaired water is pushed east and west, posing a potential threat to coastal waterways, wetlands and estuaries that also must deal with the challenges that come with urban development.
Excess nutrients can result in harmful algal blooms along Florida’s east and west coasts, but phosphorus and nitrogen are not the only compromising components of the Lake Okeechobee billion-gallon-a-day discharges. As noted earlier, pesticides, bacteria, toxins and other contaminants all flow east and west into some of Florida’s most productive coastal environments.
It is a simple solution. Just not an easy one. Instead of east and west, let the water flow south. That’s why Congress in 2000 enacted the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP), a 30-year, $7.8 billion project.
It’s a massive undertaking, moving mountains of earth – and attitudes and perceptions as well.
Now estimated to cost nearly $16 billion, CERP is required to maintain the current level of water supply and flood control while “reconfiguring the internal infrastructure so it is more compatible to the needs of the environment” according to Davis. The goal, of course, is to allow the River of Grass to do what it was intended to do, while still protecting South Florida’s economy and 18-fold increase in population since the compartmentalization began.
Is it worth it? A valid question. What do you spend to right the honest mistakes of the past? Perhaps we live with them, learn from them and move on. What could $16 billion do in other scientific, educational or humanitarian pursuits?
This is where attitudes are shifting when considering environmental remediation. Is it a cost or is it an opportunity? When working the restoration math, the return on investment must be part of the equation.
In the report Measuring the Economic Benefits of America’s Everglades Restoration prepared for the Everglades Foundation by Mather Economics of Roswell, Ga., it was found that Everglades restoration would have significant economic impacts. The report stated the “best estimate is that restoration (by the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan) will generate an increase in economic welfare of approximately $46.5 billion in net present value terms that could range up to $123.9 billion.”
That’s nearly three dollars returned for every dollar invested.
“The Everglades restoration project is vital to the future of Florida, providing for the appropriate water infrastructure,” said Everglades Foundation CEO Eric Eikenberg. “The project will produce a substantial return on investment with economic benefits streaming to tourism, recreation, development and fisheries.”
But there is a very real personal benefit as well. Have you ever been thirsty? Seriously thirsty? Well South Florida is thirsty and has been for years. Since the 1950s, compartmentalization of the Everglades has diverted freshwater east and west and away from the Biscayne Aquifer.
Without substantial freshwater recharge from sheet flow through the River of Grass, saltwater intrusion into the Biscayne Aquifer that has already begun will continue. Increased salinity in the aquifer threatens the water supply to the entire region.
The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan will combat this threat. “The return on this investment also comes in the form of a protected water supply for 9 million Floridians and millions of tourists,” said Eikenberg.
By realigning the natural flow of freshwater from Lake Okeechobee south to the Biscayne Aquifer saltwater intrusion levels might be held at current levels and pushed back to some degree.
Water, water, everywhere. And perhaps – with hard work, adequate funding and maybe a little luck – plenty to drink.