PART 1
This is a diagram of the original CERP plan for the Everglades, which is undergoing revisions and improvements.
In the Tampa Bay region, including Hillsborough, Manatee and Pinellas counties, grassland habitats have been reduced by dredging, community and port development, sewage treatment plants, industrial discharges and turbidity from dredging the main shipping canal.
Between 1950 and 1982, seagrass habitats declined from 40,000 acres to 21,600 acres, and rivers, streams and waterways in Tampa Bay have become polluted. In 2013, Environment Florida, a state environmental group, worked at educating the public by sending more than 100,000 letters to the federal Environmental Protection Agency calling for increased protections of our waterways such as the Hillsborough River and Tampa Bay.
This past January, Floridians from 16 cities, including Tampa, and from 100 different organizations gathered. They were concerned about water pollution and over-consumption of their water resources and made a stand for clean water.
These “Commit to Clean Water” events were held in Tampa, Bradenton, Boynton Beach, Fort Myers, Fort Pierce, Jacksonville, Key West, Ocala, Orlando, Stuart, Vero Beach, Naples, Gainesville, Interlachen and Palm Bay.
From the Apalachicola River to Tampa Bay and from the Everglades to our countless springs and wetlands, Florida’s water is one of our most treasured resources. And residents, environmentalists and water management professionals are genuinely concerned about losing it. As taxpayers, we are going to be paying for the redevelopment of our natural resources, so it is best that we are aware of why we are doing it, and the facts behind it.
Crippling our state’s water management philosophy is an event that began in the 1930s to devastate Florida in the name of progress: the draining of the Everglades, which has impacted the state as a whole.
Prior to the 1800s, the Everglades region was an undeclared national treasure. The wetlands was a sea of grass where birds, panthers, alligators, deer and manatee flourished. The rain-fed series of rivers, lakes and wetlands that began just south of Orlando and traveled through Lake Okeechobee to the southern tip of Florida and then east and west from there to the coasts was the original site of the Everglades. It covered almost 3 million acres.
Now the Everglades as an ecosystem is in peril and has been for a number of years. The Everglades is now half its original size.
Florida acquired the Everglades in the mid-1800s because of the federal “Swamp and Overflowed Lands Act,” which passed with only one condition attached to it: The Everglades must be drained, lawmakers said.
Dredging and draining the Everglades was done in the 1920s.
Canals were built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to control the flooding and to drain the Everglades as early as the 1930s in the Everglades Agricultural Area to honor this agreement. They also confined the Kissimmee River to a 53-foot-long canal that drained thousands of acres of wetlands.
In the 20th century, more than 1,700 miles of levees and canals were built. They were authorized by Congress and came to be known as the Central and Southern Florida Project (C&SF Project) in 1948. It was known as the largest and most extensive civil works project of its day. More than half of the Everglades was also destroyed by urban development, industry and agriculture. New species of plants were introduced, which, because of their fast growth, were a threat to the native plants. This also impacted the ecosystem as the vegetation grew through South Florida.
Most of the negative changes in the ecosystem that occurred from that time period are acknowledged by the South Florida Water Management District and the Corps of Engineers.
They questioned the purpose of this land. Would this “wet swamp” continue to lie unoccupied, or could it be settled and reach its full potential? Draining the Everglades was the solution reached.
“River of Interests: Water Management in South Florida and the Everglades 1948-2010” by historians Matthew Godfrey and Theodore Catton was commissioned by the Corps of Engineers in 2004. The Jacksonville division of the Corps of Engineers serves most of Florida, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Suwanee, Withlacoochee and Alapaha river drainages in southern Georgia. In Florida, the Corps traces its roots back to 1821.
“River of Interests” completely defines the subtle history of that period in a complete and objective way. Ironically, this government document was honored last year by placement upon the American Library Association’s notable documents list in 2012. It is said this would be the equivalent of winning the Pulitzer Prize for the writing of a government document. The writers describe the Everglades and the process that made the habitat unique.
“The climate influences how much water flows through South Florida which is characterized by two inland ridges — one along the east coast and one to the west — forming a shallow bowl-like valley,” the authors write in “River of Interests.”
A slight tilt in the bowl means that water drains in a southwesterly direction, but, before the beginnings of drainage and development in the late 1800s, this
natural receptacle retained much of the large amounts of rainfall that cascaded to the ground. Supplementing this supply was a slow-moving flow of water emanating from the upper chain of lakes forming the headwaters of the Kissimmee River — lakes Kissimmee, Tohopekaliga, Hatchineha and Cypress, to name a few — located just south of present-day Orlando. Water from these lakes meandered down the twisting and turning Kissimmee to Lake Okeechobee, the second-largest freshwater lake in the continental United States. … The lake had no real outlet (the St. Lucie River began 20 miles to the east of the lake, flowing to the Atlantic Ocean, while the Caloosahatchee River started three miles west, running to the Gulf). Taylor Slough was the other major drainage, running southwest from a more easterly position into Florida Bay, located just south of Florida’s southern tip. The Miami, New and Hillsboro rivers also flowed through the Everglades, taking water east to Biscayne Bay. As these waterways deposited into the estuaries of the Ten Thousand Islands, Florida Bay and Biscayne Bay, fresh water mixed with salt water, creating a habitat where shrimp, lobster and fish thrived.
Before Euro-American habitation of South Florida, the Everglades was a complex system of plant life linked by water, including expansive areas of sawgrass sloughs, wet prairies, cypress swamps, mangrove swamps and coastal lagoons and bays. It consisted of 2.9 million acres of land dominated by sawgrass and tree islands … in the words of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, who bequeathed the term ‘river of grass’ to the Everglades (playing off of “panhokee,” the Seminole word for the region meaning ‘grassy waters’) … Yet by the last quarter of the 20th century, this diversity of life has largely ceased to exist, and the Everglades itself had shrunk to half its size. These conditions led to concerns about the C&SF Project’s impact on the South Florida ecosystem and ultimately to cries for dismantling the works. The following history of water management in South Florida since 1948 shows both the short-term value and the long-term pitfalls that the Corps’ engineering of the South Florida environment has generated. In doing so, it focuses on the interaction of different interest groups, all with diverse stakes and perspectives and how their conflicts and compromises influenced the direction that the Corps pursued.
Congress authorized the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, or CERP, to act as a plan to fix the damage the drainage caused to the ecosystem, as well as to redirect the flow of groundwater to the Everglades, rather than allowing it to discharge into the ocean.
At that time, it was thought CERP would take 30 years to complete at a cost of $9.5 million, which could grow to $11.8 billion. This plan was also known as the “Restudy.”
It is important to know that in 1948, there were only 500,000 people living in that region. Now there are more than 6 million. There are three times more people living there now, which necessitated changes be made in the original CERP document, for it is now predicted that by 2050 as much as 2 million gallons of water a day will be needed by inhabitants, industry and agriculture in South Florida, according to SFWMD scientists.
The South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Task Force was given the task of studying CERP and finding out what had worked and what had not. The task force calls this study the Central Everglades Planning Project, or CEPP. SFWMD and the Corps of Engineers are partners with this task force.
The final combined goal was to critique CERP and make sure its goals were being met, as well as to speed up the timeline to catch the water flowing out to the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic and redirect it south to the central portion of the Everglades, Florida Bay and Everglades National Park, as well as protect the coastal estuaries. The task force also wanted to maintain an open public forum with residents and taxpayers.
It was hoped that the redirected water would be used in bringing back to life a dying Everglades ecosystem, with the remainder to be used by farmers and residents in South Florida.
The Corps of Engineers and SFWMD delivered the first draft of the Everglades’ system status report this past March on CERP.
“This multi-agency report evaluates current monitoring data from different geographic regions within the Everglades ecosystem to determine if the goals and objectives of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan are being met,” Andy LoSchiavo, system status report coordinator for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Jacksonville District, said when presenting the report. “The data reviewed in the report are used to summarize changes in the ecosystem and to recognize and discuss, when necessary, why goals are not currently being met and how adaptive management may be incorporated to better manage the system.”
Three public informational meetings were held on the report through April, and public input was accepted through April 29.
Read The Everglades: Part 2, CEPP funding stalled by Army Corps of Engineers