Everglades restoration: Water storage, political will key to success

Michael Grunwald, a journalist who works as a senior writer for Politico Magazine, gave the keynote speech Friday at the 27th annual Southwest Florida Water Resources Conference at Pelican Preserve in Fort Myers.

He is the author of “The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise.” He addressed what’s happening with the Everglades more than a decade after his book was published in 2006.

Grunwald, who spoke for 40 minutes, provided a few quick history lessons and personal anecdotes along the way, painting a picture of how politics has mostly gotten in the way of significant progress.

First, it’s important to understand the importance of water resources, which he called “the most precious resources that Florida has.”

“Getting the water right — it’s a really big deal,” he said. “I think the fate of Everglades restoration will tell us a lot about this crazy experimentation of human habitation on Earth.”

Grunwald, who lives in Miami with his family, worked for The Washington Post and resided in Washington, D.C., when he wrote “The Swamp.”

“South Florida really is nice,” he said. “We’ve contributed to this explosive growth that everybody complains about in Florida, and we’re not sorry.”

In October, Grunwald published a piece in Politico Magazine about Cape Coral called “The Boomtown That Shouldn’t Exist.” The article states that the city “was built on total lies. One big storm could wipe it off the map.”

The true question, as people continue to move to Florida, he said, is how can we learn to live in harmony with the environment?

“It’s a test if we can clean up our screw-ups,” he said. “We’ve definitely got a mess down here.”

Grunwald referenced Lake Okeeochobee “slime water” that has caused algal blooms at times in recent years in the Caloosahatchee River and the St. Lucie River estuaries.

“Toxic ecostank can really kill tourism,” he said.

There is filth on the bottom of Lake O, the loss of drinking wells and 69 endangered species in the ecosystem, to name just a few problems.

“It’s all the same mess,” he said. “This stuff is all connected. There’s one general problem and if you fix it you’ll fix the others. The problem is water storage.”

Thomas Buckingham Smith of St. Augustine was the first person to file an official U.S. government report on the Everglades, back in 1848. He encountered what he called “profound and wild solitude.”

“It was completely pristine,” Grunwald said. “It kind of helps remind you what’s at stake.”

Still, Smith wanted to drain the swamp, also calling it an “inhospitable marsh.”

Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, Florida’s governor from 1905 to 1909, thought wetlands were wastelands. He called water the “common enemy of the people of Florida, and he declared war.”

Fast-forward to 1928, when 2,000 settlers were killed after the Lake O dike crumbled due to a hurricane.

That disaster brought the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers into the picture, eventually creating what is now known as the Herbert Hoover Dike and 2,000 miles of levees and canals. This work made the area safe, leading to a building boom.

“It was water control that made our megalopolis possible,” Grunwald said.

It made it feasible for the Orlando area to become home to Disney World, which opened in 1971, and paved the way for other major development.

“It’s how you got Cape Coral, the waterfront wonderland with 400 miles of canals,” he said. “It was an early exercise in rebranding. Now it’s America’s fastest-growing city.”

Water managers, Grunwald said, have used Lake O as a combination reservoir and sewer, and the dam is leaking, with billions of gallons of “icky lake water,” blasted down the Caloosahatchee River whenever it is deemed necessary.

“We’re still dumping the debris on you,” he said.

In the past year, Cape Coral had such a dire drought that it couldn’t rely on its fire hydrants. Then it had a major rain event, followed by Hurricane Irma, which dumped lots more water.

Cape Coral tests pumping to remedy drought

Grunwald took the audience to Dec. 11, 2000, the date President Bill Clinton signed a Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan into law.

Jeb Bush, Florida’s governor, stood alongside the president, with Bush calling it “a project to resuscitate a national treasure.”

“It’s an incredibly complicated plan … with a million moving parts,” Grunwald said. “It’s mostly a water storage project."

The plan he said, “was about building a bigger bag,” even as less land is available because the state is becoming more populated.

“Now half the Everglades has been replaced by us,” he said. “The Corps was promising to paint this restoration masterpiece even though the canvas was going to shrink every day … all that storage they we're going to build. Well, so far, they’ve built none. We’re in year 18.”

There have, however, been a few minor successes.

Those include the completion in 2013 of a one-mile-long bridge on Tamiami Trail to restore water flow to Everglades National Park; a $2 billion project to fix water quality in the Everglades that is “actually getting there”; a new reservoir recently approved for the northern Everglades; and the restoration of the Kissimmee River.

“You get out of Mother Nature’s way, she comes back,” he said. “It’s a river again, it works.”

Water bill authorizes $2 billion for Everglades

But there’s a much bigger problem.

“They haven’t done the main thing they’re supposed to do,” Grunwald said. “There’s less storage in the plan as it stands today. There doesn’t seem to be a Plan B.”

The ultimate success or failure of Everglades restoration may impact other projects across the country, including work to restore the Great Lakes.

“A successful project could really usher in a new era,” Grunwald said.

The world is watching, and the outcome of Everglades restoration could have larger implications than most people might think.

“The Everglades is a test … most of all it’s going to be a moral test, a test to restrain ourselves,” he said. “If we pass that test, we might deserve to keep the planet.”

Connect with this reporter: email clogan@news-press.com and follow on Twitter @caseylo

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