Marsh Madness

Fishermen have proposed a way to restore the Everglades and South Florida rivers, but will their idea ever become a reality? 

- Hal Herring

BLACK, TOXIC WATER was flowing into the Caloo sa hatchee and St. Lucie Rivers. Following the rains of Hurricane Irma in Sept. 2017, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began discharging highly polluted water—billions of gallons of it— from Lake Okee cho bee into the South Florida rivers to prevent the flooding of agricultural land to the south, but at the same time poisoning some of the richest gamefish habitat in the world.

This was hardly a first.

In the summer of 2016, the Corps had discharged more than 200 billion gallons of water from Lake Okeechobee, setting off a chain of catastrophes. A 239square- mile bloom of toxic algae had been spreading across the lake all summer, and when that water was released, the Caloo sa hatchee and St. Lucie were flooded with it. Beaches were closed. People fell ill. Fish died. Officials advised people to stay away from the very waters that had made this part of Florida one of the nation’s most famous fishing destinations. It was the worst the pollution had ever been, but the discharges happen every rainy year in South Florida. So when the black water poured into the rivers again this past September, people knew what to expect.

“It’s economic free fall,” a St. Lucie fishing guide told me on a recent trip to Florida. Water dumped from Lake Okeechobee had devastated the local fishing and tourism industries and killed the St. Lucie’s seagrass beds— nurseries for grouper, snapper, seatrout, redfish, and more. The damming of Lake Okeechobee necessitates these discharges and cuts off the Everglades and Florida Bay, one of the world’s greatest saltwater fisheries, from a fresh flow of water.