How it happened.

        As of now, billions of gallons of polluted water are flowing into the St. Lucie River, the Indian River and the Caloosahatchee Estuary from Lake Okeechobee. The resultant environmental damage is horriffic and probably far from transitory. The estuarial waters of four Southeast Florida counties have been declared emergency zones by that strangest of authorities Governor Rick Scott. The second half of this essay will discuss that in more detail.

       Here's today's ABC News' assessment of the situation: 

  "A smelly, "guacamole-thick" muck is fouling a stretch of beaches promoted as Florida's "Treasure Coast," where lawmakers and residents blame the federal government (more on this later,too!),  saying the algae crisis is fueled by freshwater flows controlled by Army officials to protect an erosion-prone dike. The blue-green algae is the latest contaminant featured in years long arguments over water flowing from Lake Okeechobee, which is critical to South Florida's water supply and flood control systems.

At Central Marine boat docks in Stuart, pea-green and brown algae coated the water Thursday and smelled strongly like cow manure. Blooms that started last week in the St. Lucie River continue to spread, threatening Atlantic beaches expecting crowds of families for the holiday weekend. Sarah Chaney, a receptionist at Central Marine, said boaters and fisherman are cancelling reservations after seeing reports of the algae, which she called "horrible and disgusting." "I would describe them as guacamole-thick. And it stinks," said Gabriella Ferrero, spokeswoman for Martin County."

       As the system is currently structured the US Army Corps of Engineers ("The Corps")   has no options. It must reduce the water level in Lake Okeechobee in case of a potential wet hurricane, common in even October like Hurricanes Wilma and Isaac.

       Before we pile all the  blame on  the Corps for the incredible damage  being inflicted on the 'Glades and Atlantic and Gulf estuaries, a short history lesson is appropriate. The  Everglades ecosystem and, by extension,  Okeechobee  has been brutalized by a number of criminally thoughtless  decisions, compounded by political negligence and greed on an epic scale.

        Florida land robber barons on the grand scale, The Collier family, built the privately funded Tamiami Trail in the 1925-1920's  to open up Naples, where they owned a significant amount of the family's more than 1 million acres of Southwest Florida land, to east coast tourists in the 1915-20's. The Tamiami Trail formed a dike preventing natural water flow from the northern Everglades marshes into what have become Everglades National Park and the great fishery of Florida Bay.

        There are gated discharge structures and culverts under the Tamiami Trail, however they allow only a fraction of the excess rain water to flow south as the Everglades system once functioned.  Overly high water is inundating the unique 'Tree Islands," a major essential habitat for deer and other mammals indigenous to the Everglades during times of excessive rain water. The fact that these hammocks are also sacred to the Miccosukee, has apparently been a source of no concern to Tallahassee.

        In 1928 the "Great Hurricane" (we didn't use names then)  devastated the  small dike that then surrounded much of Lake Okeechobee, and as a result, most of the small farming communities that had grown around the south side of the lake. Additionally,  thousands of acres had been devoted to raising cattle on the lush grass that the muck fields provided. The King Ranch had a similar operation for their famous Brahma crossbred cattle. U.S. Sugar grew a total of 50,000-plus acres of sugar cane.

        The storm of 1928 also resulted in the drowning of about 3,000 people.  President Herbert Hoover requested the Congress to pass legislation authorizing the construction of a high dike around Lake Okeechobee. Apparently no one thought better of it or objected.

        Long, wet summer rain seasons and fall hurricanes in the 1940s, caused  excess water flow through the Everglades and even in extreme conditions over the Tamiami Trail into what is now the Everglades National Park. The Corps  studied the average size of Lake Okeechobee and designed a dike to surround it. The Corps then made an engineering decision, now realized as tragically flawed, to cut off the natural flow-way from Lake Okeechobee to the downstream Everglades and dump it more "efficiently" to the east and west estuaries, and ultimately, to  the Atlantic and Gulf. In all liklihood no one then on the planet "knew any better."

        Maybe the subsequent creation of almost a million acres now known as the Everglades Agricultural Area of rich organic soils -- the byproduct of centuries of dying marsh grasses -- was the incentive, but this error in judgment has created a conflict that will continue until sufficient land is acquired to restore a flow-way from Lake Okeechobee to the northern Florida Everglades and to allow flow south and under Tamiami Trail into Everglades National Park.

        While blaming The Corps  is the popular thing to do, the later "straightening"  of the Kissimmee River south from Lake Tohopekaliga  just South of Orlando, which massively exacerbated the already serious Okeechobee drainage issue  was not the inception of the Corps. Then  as now, corrupt or at best ignorant,  politicians again did the bidding of the land holders who had bought inland Florida  wetlands cheap, anticipating that drainage on the Government's  dime might occur and seriously improve their portfolios.  The decision,  by the landed power brokers to persuade the then-governor of Florida and the congressional delegation to order the  Corps to dredge the Kissimmee River to allow accelerated drainage in the headwaters of Lake Okeechobee was an ecological disaster.  

        Hundreds of thousands of acres of wetlands that served as storage for Lake Okeechobee and slowed down rain-driven floods moving south into the Kissimmee chain of lakes were dried, allowed developers to sell real estate around those lakes, the river's increased depth and hugely increased flow rate, guaranteeing an unnatural low water level.  The Kissimmee chain of lakes during high rainfall periods had held billions of gallons of water that was slowly released down the Kissimmee into Lake Okeechobee naturally.

        The wetland marshes and  wildlife treasures of  the Kissimmee's  flood plain  were drained and turned into cattle pastures when the project was completed. One huge beneficiary of this was the Mormon Church whose Deseret Ranch of over 300,000 acres also benefitted from a collateral  reduction in the St. John's River  floodplain.  Excessive rainwater now flows  at unnatural speed into the lake, raising it to dangerous levels and carrying a nutrient and pollution-filled muck that now covers half the lake's bottom.

        The Caloosahatchee River was connected to Lake Okeechobee by Hamilton Disston, one of Florida's pioneer speculators. The St. Lucie Canal was completed in 1926 to provide easy access from the lake to Stuart, where ships would carry vegetables and fruit to the upper east coast and provide access for the east to the west coast for pleasure boats. Unfortunately it also created an "opportunity" to dump excess Okeechobee water to both coasts.

        The Corps  realized that an overflowing Lake Okeechobee  threatened  the "iffy" stability  of the Hoover Dike and that these two outlets -- the St. Lucie Canal to the Atlantic via local estuaries  and the much longer Caloosahatchee canal/River -- would serve as escape valves whenever there was excessive rainfall and a rising lake that could threaten the integrity of the Hoover Dike, especially on the south side, where farming communities had grown in size.

        With the connection to the Everglades severed, the present day USACE have no options other than releasing billions of gallons of water that is polluted from years of agricultural back-pumping from the Everglades Agricultural Area and now large amounts of nutrients including  the nutrient rich  cattle wastes flowing down the Kissimmee and the other headwaters of the lake.

        Essentially, Lake Okeechobee has been transformed by human actions, some ill planned and done with government funds at the behest of a wealthy few for personal gain, some simply unanticipated, but all for political and financial gain, into a giant Petrie dish which must occasionally be flushed into pristine Gulf and Atlantic tidal estuaries where it wreaks havoc, as nutrients feed huge and toxic algae blooms.

My second installment will deal with current obstacles to remediation. It is an even sadder tale, unfortunately.