Sanibel chef competes on Food Network show featuring Bobby Flay
NEWS

2016 already a 'disaster' for Caloosahatchee watershed

AMY BENNETT WILLIAMS
AWILLIAMS@NEWS-PRESS.COM

It's not even close to over, but Caloosahatchee advocates are already reaching to find ways to describe just how bad a year it's been for the river.

Eric Milbrandt, the Marine Lab Director for the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation documents grasses in the Caloosahatchee River on Tuesday. They are monitoring the health, growth and density of the grasses. Milbrandt says the fresh water is hurting the health of grasses and their are no short term solutions.

Last week, water managers and the wet weather presented them with a new milestone: 1 million acre feet of freshwater flows to the estuary.

It's only the ninth time in more than half a century that's happened, and if it keeps up this way, 2016 may go down as one of the three worst years since anyone began keeping records.

Riverwatch joins Waterkeeper Alliance to protect Caloosahatchee

So how much is a million acre feet? If that much water were dumped on Lee County (the dry part, at least) we'd be 2 feet under.

If it were pumped into 20,000-gallon swimming pools, it'd fill 16 million of them.

And if you were a scientist trying to communicate the effect of all that water — even if you were a normally restrained sort — you might well use the word "disaster," as Caloosahatchee Riverwatch director John Capece does.

"It's already been a horrible year, but if we are hit with a tropical storm, hurricane or just a bad rainfall event like we experienced in January and June, then 2016 could go in the records as one of the absolute worst years ever," Capece said.

Save Our Water: Market Watch Summit presented by The News-Press | The News-Press Ticketing

A soaking wet dry season turned the normally Earl Grey-colored water French roast brown as water managers released murky water from Lake Okeechobee  to keep pressure off the aging, earthen Herbert Hoover dike.

Eric Milbrandt, the Marine Lab Director for the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation displays an unhealthy sprig of shoal grass from the Caloosahatchee River. He and a crew document the health, growth and density of several types of grasses in the river.

Algae turned the state's east coast guacamole-colored before the Caloosahatchee greened up too. Gov. Rick Scott declared a state of emergency as politicians made whistle-stop appearances before crowds of residents and business owners worried about the tourism industry. And all the while, bickering over what to do about the crisis continues: Send the water south? Stay the course? Fast-track storage reservoirs? Condemn sugar acreage?

Whatever the ultimate solution, what stakeholders agree on is that when that much freshwater floods the tidal river's estuary, the salinity out to Sanibel drops too low for sea grasses in that area to survive.

On a recent afternoon, a team of Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation scientists was checking for shoal grass in south Fort Myers, across from the Cape Coral Yacht Club,  but things looked grim. For starters, the shells of the oysters crusted on the sides of the boat slip where they'd picked up a pair of tag-along journalists were all gaping wide, empty and dead.

Expert: Local waters 'ripe' for algae blooms

Out in the river, the water was decidedly unsalty, at four parts per thousand compared with the 14 that might be expected in a normal wet season. And the shoal grass they'd hoped to be able to measure was too sparse to even count. No grass meant nowhere for tiny critters to hang out or little fish to hide. No little fish meant no food for the big fish anglers like to catch, and so on.

In the five years the nonprofit foundation has been measuring conditions in this area, this is the worst they've observed, said research scientist Eric Milbrandt.

"We're seeing a very, very low abundance of seagrass," he said. "We've had a very wet year and almost no dry season."

That's meant toxic algae blooms, closed beaches and wiped-out seagrass, contributing to the worst summers on the river Alva native Jason Erwin can remember.

"I grew up on the river, swimming in it, jumping off the bridge, boating in it," the 35-year-old welder said. "But now, the water’s green. It stinks. It's slimed" — hardly the Caloosahatchee he remembers from his childhood.

Jason Erwin and his grilfriend Barbara Agnew test a boat for a client on the Caloosahatchee River several weeks ago.  Erwin grew up using the river for recreation purposes and is concerned about the water quality.

"It was an amazing thing to have in your backyard," he said.  "There's no other way to put it."

Yet depressing as he finds its present condition, Erwin's optimistic. "I think things will get better. I think  everybody bringing it out in the open helps.

"Someday, I want to take my grandchildren and great grandchildren out on the river."