A salty future? Everglades restoration is key to state’s survival

If you can see through the smoke of forest fires, consider the experiment of putting 18 million people, plus visitors, on a narrow peninsula — Florida — in the midst of an historic drought.

Soon enough, your eyes should stop itching. What should bother you more is what you can’t see: the effect of drought on shallow-water aquifers serving Floridians with drinking water.

Here is the problem for a state built on limestone: If the aquifer empties, salt water rushes in. A little home experiment can show most of what you need to know.

Fill a shallow plate with a film of water. That would be the bay, the gulf or the ocean.

Now wring a sponge dry. Call it drought.

That would be the Biscayne aquifer. The holes of the sponge are not so different from the geological formation beneath our feet, porous and filled with occlusions and voids that allow the water below ground to migrate the same way it does above ground.

If you have a good imagination, picture a straw pulling water from the sponge. That is a drinking-water well, and represents billions of dollars of pipes and pumps, serving the showers and sinks, the washers and sprinklers and farmland of one of the nation’s fastest-growing states.

The end of the experiment is simple. You put the semi-dry sponge in the plate with a little water and what happens is that the sea wicks into the aquifer.

The most serious consequence of historic drought conditions in Florida is the destruction of drinking-water wells by saltwater intrusion.

It is a really, really big problem, and if this drought goes on much longer, it will be news around the world.

If you have a freshwater swimming pool, you are probably aware that you can’t recirculate chloride in the same pool system. The pump may not be designed to handle the corrosive effects of salt.

Also, at a time when reducing energy demand is urgently needed, the cost or removing salt from municipal drinking-water wells and treatment facilities is untold, unfunded billions of dollars.

There is a further problem with saltwater intrusion, noted by environmentalists who have shouted themselves hoarse over the issue:

It is one thing to know about pollution on the surface where you can see it and take measures (one hopes) to avoid it.

It is quite another thing to wreck an underground aquifer you rely on for the only substance you can’t live without: drinking water.

Are water managers worried about that happening?

Yes.

Ever since Florida was settled, engineering skills have been applied to the draining of wetlands to make the land habitable.

Through the housing boom, elected officials pressed water managers to use more engineering and more industrial processes to wring the maximum productivity from Florida’s aquifers.

If you looked closely, you could see the effects on the ground and it made you want to cry: vast de-watered expanses of Florida, underlying water tables sucked dry by crop irrigation or municipalities.

It was only two years ago that water managers, frightened by a series of dangerous hurricanes, opened control gates to lower the water level of Lake Okeechobee and dumped billions of gallons of polluted fresh water, causing massive ecological destruction along both Florida coasts.

What does the current drought tell us, coming so quickly and so dramatically on the heels of overabundance?

One, that population pressure has removed the elasticity from demand and supply — extraordinary in a state that received more than 50 inches of average rainfall per year and wastes most of it in order for America’s most heavily subsidized crop, sugar, to be profitably grown south of Florida’s liquid heart.

Second, that restoration of the Everglades is more of a necessity than many people ever expected would arise from its benefits to nature.

There are a few critics who argue that global warming will make tens of billions of taxpayer dollars spent on the Everglades a waste.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

If we don’t take care of the interior part of the ecosystem — the Everglades — and make sure it is full of clean, fresh water at the right time of year, there won’t be drinking water at the edges.

Wherever those coastal edges are, in an age of global warming, that’s where most people will be.

Unless, of course, Florida turns into a pillar of salt.

In the dark with gators and crocs

If you went to sleep and dreamt that environmentalists were being hounded and chased by the FBI because they advocated the conversion of lands owned by Big Sugar to Everglades restoration, you might call that a nightmare.

But you might not.

Watershed moment: Eminent domain could rescue Everglades

Here is a New Year’s wish: that the agony of Florida’s environment and coastal economies, increasingly threatened by polluted water gushing from Lake Okeechobee, will be relieved by the one measure no government agency has had the courage to propose — the taking by eminent domain of large tracts in the Everglades Agricultural Area, replacing sugar cane with vast storage and cleansing marshes.

Arthur Teele, environment linked in struggle

When Arthur E. Teele, once the most powerful elected official in Florida’s largest county, committed suicide last week, a shock wave pulsed through Miami, where he had served as chairman of the county commission and, later, as a city commissioner.

An African-American and Republican (he served in the Reagan administration as an undersecretary of transportation), Teele was a brilliant tactician with poor eyesight who saw into every corner of Miami politics.

In the end, a maze of debt and financial difficulties enmeshed him in a very ordinary way. But Teele was not an ordinary man. He will be remembered in sadness—and in one way that has not been remarked: for what he might have meant for the environment.

Spin machine busts gasket

June 8, 2005

“A federal judge ruled . . . that the state and federal governments have violated the 1992 Everglades cleanup settlement by allowing repeated excessive discharges of phosphorus into the vast wetlands and failing to meet a key stormwater-treatment deadline.”—Associated Press report last week

Hear ye, hear ye! Come gather ‘round the federal district court in Miami.

Quick. Look, before it disappears. The Everglades spin machine is down, little sparks shooting out. Get your cameras. Point and click.

For a new state capital

Church is a good place for Sunday worship, but to contemplate the miracle of Creation, sometimes all you need to do is take a good walk.

The point of a good walk is obvious to anyone who has taken one. You start in one place and end up in another, even though you return where you started.

Which brings me to Tallahassee, a state capital so full of lobbyists you can’t do business without one handing you a towel when you finish.

Seeing red in the Legislature

The Florida Legislature has a lot in common with red tides. It is easier to see when sunshine makes the toxins light up.

Today the Legislature is aiming to pass a bill to make it much more difficult for citizens to change the Florida Constitution by petition drive.

Heaven and hell in the Everglades

Clunk. That was the sound last week when a report on the Everglades by the National Research Council (NRC) hit the desk of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.Of course, I’ve never seen the governor’s desk. I write from the other side of the castle keep and pole axes, outside the moat.

Eyes wide open on Florida

Many people who care about restoring the Everglades will be in Naples this weekend at the annual meeting of the Everglades Coalition, representatives of 45 conservation-minded groups from the local, state and national level, and fishermen, hunters and Native Americans.

More met in Orlando last November at the annual conference of the American Water Resources Association, eager for opportunities in water management, pipes and infrastructure imbedded in the latest iteration of hope for the Everglades: some $13 billion and counting.

Science matters

Unless your belief system doesn’t begrudge a millimeter of doubt, there is calm and order in science. Recently we learned that atoms can now be viewed through powerful microscopes. A scientist from Oak Ridge Labs described the scale of viewing an atom as the equivalent of looking at a penny from across the continent. Wow.

There is charm in science, too. Think of The Weather Channel, how you dependably are returned to your local weather on a blue screen, elevator music and animated signs in boxes to represent the coming days that are usually nothing out of the ordinary before returning to typhoons in Asia, tornadoes in Omaha and mayhem in Florida.