Cash and Commitment Rescue Everglades Replumbing

Proof of Program’s Success Remains Decades Away

By Thomas F. Armistead / ENR

Hope is the most fragile natural resource in Florida’s Everglades. Its pioneer farmers’ hopes for bountiful yields from the rich peat soil were overwhelmed by Florida’s violent weather, which swamped them with floods from vast Lake Okeechobee. The hopes of its latter-day defenders for quick action to save the dying ecosystem have been ground down by the deliberate pace of planning and the failure of Congress to authorize funds for the plans.

Hope was trampled as competing visions of the Everglades’ future fought for supremacy. Finally, with no one’s vision fully realized, stakeholders accepted that the deadlock itself was the greatest threat to the Glades’ survival. Eight years ago, hope revived as consensus formed around an effort to save the Everglades with the largest ecosystem restoration in history. The Water Resources Development Act of 2000 established the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, with an estimated $7.8-billion cost, to be shared equally between the federal government and Florida.

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But hope flagged again as years passed with no new funding for the program. Its cost now is estimated at $10.9 billion and is rising, its completion optimistically set for some time in the 2030s or maybe 2040. Its breath-taking goal is to restore the natural hydrologic conditions and ecosystem of 18,000 sq miles of engineered landscape and seascape without harming the interests or infringing upon the rights of the 6.5 million people who depend on the artificial environment.

Planners are proceeding with extreme caution because of the unprecedented nature of the restoration and the recognition that hard engineering without thought for environmental consequences was what caused the damage in the first place. “We don’t want to make a negative impact and call it an environmental restoration project,” says Kenneth G. Ammon, deputy executive director at the South Florida Water Management District, West Palm Beach, the state agency responsible for Everglades restoration.

“The most significant thing that has come to light over the last seven years is the realization that we need to apply ‘incremental adaptive restoration’,” says Ammon. That means trying innovative solutions for hydrology and water-quality problems on a pilot scale and testing the results with science and modeling methods before building large components that operate on the model. It’s an approach recalling the old construction adage, “Measure twice, cut once,” enforced here by limited funding as well as awareness of the potential for doing harm.

Fresh Hope

Today, hope is budding again in the Everglades. In January 2007, Gov. Charlie Crist (R) took office. In March, he asked the state Legislature to appropriate $190 million for Everglades restoration and related construction projects. Over the next few months, he appointed five new members, known for their Everglades activism, to SFWMD’s nine-member governing board.

A year later, his actions have elicited praise from a leader of the Everglades Coalition, an alliance of 47 environmental organizations that have seldom felt much warmth for state governments. “We’re all really excited about Gov. Crist. He’s much more open,” says Drew Martin, coalition co-chair. “There’s been a change in the new administration.”

Action in Congress also has inspired hope. In November, after seven years without a Water Resources Development Act, Congress overturned President Bush’s veto and passed WRDA 2007, authorizing $1.82 billion for three Everglades projects. That law was psychologically effective because “it got the authorization ball rolling again,” says Stuart J. Appelbaum, Everglades division chief for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Jacksonville, Fla., district. But authorization must be followed by appropriation. Ammon expects it this year.

Tamiami Trail

Hope blossomed in January, when Lynn Scarlett, assistant secretary of the U.S. Interior Dept., told the annual Everglades Coalition conference, “We are determined to get the Tamiami Trail project moving forward this year.” She pledged to “get a shovel in the ground” by September.

That project will elevate a stretch of U.S. Route 41 to restore the broad, shallow “sheetflow” of water through Shark River Slough, the Everglades National Park’s principal water supply, blocked since the 1920s. In 1989, Congress told the Corps to modify water-management structures to allow sheetflow when it passed the Everglades National Park Protection and Expansion Act, expanding the park to include the northeast part of Shark River Slough. In 2000, Congress again directed the Corps to do that work before other projects in CERP. Appelbaum calls it “the stopper in the bathtub.”

The Department of the Interior has $80 million already appropriated for the work, but design is still in dispute, says Scarlett. In early April, the Corps is scheduled to release a draft of the tentatively selected plan for the project with an estimated cost of $189.2 million. But the construction start date already has slipped to October or possibly later.

In 2004, with CERP progress lagging, the state launched Acceler8, a program to expedite funding, design and construction of eight critical CERP projects to restore 70,000 acres of wetlands, expand water treatment areas and provide 425,000 acre-ft of additional water storage 11 years ahead of CERP’s schedule. Today, construction of five of the projects is under way, and they are to be completed by 2011. SFWMD bypassed the cumbersome congressional funding process by issuing $546.1 million in certificates of participation, a type of tax-exempt revenue bond, for the work. The current cost estimate for Acceler8 projects is between $1 billion and $2 billion.

The Everglades is much more than a national park at Florida’s southern tip. The 18,000-sq-mile Everglades basin begins draining around Orlando, widens to within a few miles of the Atlantic coast, then empties through the national park via Shark River Slough and Florida Bay, its waters flowing to the Florida Keys and the coral reefs beyond. At its center is Lake Okeechobee, fed by the Kissimmee River’s inflow and historically drained by sheetflow to the south in the rainy season.

The area south of the lake has few defined rivers. Sheetflow can be 40 to 60 miles wide and 6 in. deep in most places. Efforts to drain the Everglades for agriculture began in the mid-19th century and grew into a drive for mastery of the hydrology. But success brought unintended consequences for water supply, water quality and the ecosystem.

In the 1970s and 1980s, consensus slowly shifted from seeking mastery to developing understanding and stewardship of the region’s natural resources. Everglades National Park remains as the ecosystem’s zoo, an artificially delineated habitat where there is a sense of what south Florida used to be. Now, even that is threatened.

The shift to conservation was not motivated entirely by compassion for wading birds. The lowering of the region’s water table dried the peat soil, which subsided and caught fire. It also allowed seawater to intrude in the aquifer from which Atlantic coast communities draw water. Degradation also threatened commercial fisheries and the ecosystem that itself is a key tourist attraction.

Planners in 1948 estimated that south Florida’s population in 50 years would be 2 million, with agriculture a major economic player. “The reality is 6 million people and hardly any agriculture,” says SFWMD’s Ammon. “We need more water supply.”

The Plan

The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan comprises 60 major components in 16 counties to capture and store as much as possible of the 5,200 acre-ft of fresh water per day that now is released into the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Its stated goal is to “get the water right” by meeting standards of quality, quantity, timing and distribution. That means getting water of the right purity flowing in a volume, timing and distribution pattern mimicking the historical flow that created the historic Everglades.

CERP’s aim is to remove 240 miles of barriers and route sheetflow with reduced phosphorus loading from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay through three Water Conservation Areas that curve gently south from the Everglades Agricultural Area. When water is abundant, it will be stored in Lake Okeechobee and in 181,300 acres of above-ground reservoirs and 330 aquifer-storage wells, then discharged in low volumes through 35,600 acres of man-made wetlands called Stormwater Treatment Areas. The treatment areas will cleanse the flow of leftover pollutants as it slowly flows south.

Under Florida’s Acceler8 program, construction has begun on one of the reservoirs, which will be the largest constructed water body in Florida. A joint venture of Bozeman, Mont.-based Barnard Construction Co. and Pasadena, Calif.-based Parsons Corp. signed a master contract with the water district in June 2006 for construction of the Everglades Agricultural Area Reservoir A-1.

The reservoir, designed by Black & Veatch of Kansas City, Mo., occupies a triangular 25-sq-mi footprint where sugarcane once grew 13 mi south of Lake Okeechobee on the west side of U.S. Route 27. A 21-mi-long perimeter embankment designed as a dam will rise 31 ft from the ground to the top of the parapet wall, normally impounding a pool of 190,000 acre-ft with a depth of only 121⁄2 ft because the dam must be able to contain storm surges, says Shawn Waldeck, the water district’s project manager. It will be built of onsite rock and soils, except for cement, says Neil Van Amburg, Barnard-Parsons project manager.

A silty sand with shells and marine deposits called Fort Thompson underlies the site and will become the dam’s core, with rockfill on the upstream shell and random fill on the downstream side. A 30-ft-deep bentonite slurry cutoff wall will control seepage.

The joint venture has completed the first three negotiated guaranteed-maximum-price phases—two seepage canals and construction of a rock-processing plant—valued at $265 million. Negotiations for the $300-million effort to build the dam, with a construction time of nearly three years, are nearly complete, Van Amburg says. The final phase will be for the 5,000-cfs pumping station and a bridge. Work is on budget and scheduled for completion in the first quarter of 2011.

For the 85-sq-mi Picayune Strand restoration in Collier County, planning and initial work have been completed under Acceler8, but the Corps now will take over under WRDA’s $188-million authorization.

In the early 1960s a developer drained the area, making it the southern extension of what was advertised as the world’s largest subdivision. More than 40 miles of canals channeled the sheetflow into a ditch that discharged into Faka Union Bay, and 279 miles of streets chopped the terrain into parcels for residences. The developer’s subsequent failure halted work.

The state started buying back the land in the 1980s. It was included in CERP and, in 2004, became an Acceler8 project. The land hangs like a bib from a seven-mile stretch of Interstate 75 down to the Tamiami Trail. Homes north of I-75 benefit from Picayune Strand’s drainage so maintaining flood control for them is a condition of restoring natural drainage in the south.

Under a design by Pasadena, Calif.-based Parsons Corp.’s water and infrastructure unit, contractors degraded 227 miles of roads throughout the site and placed compacted plugs in the Prairie Canal along its eastern edge to halt drainage. Random fill was added in 2006 to backfill seven miles of the canal.

The Prairie Canal provided only local drainage, so it could be plugged without affecting flood control, says Norm Prima, Parsons project manager. Before the project’s three other canals can be plugged, a pumping station and spreader canal for each must be built at the north end, providing 5,700 cfs of total pumping capacity.

Bids for the first one, an 810-cfs station, will be sought by the end of 2008 for completion in 2009. The other two will be completed in 2011 and 2013. The natural wetlands will recreate themselves once the canals are filled, Prima says. The engineer’s estimate for Picayune Strand is “close to $200 million,” he says.

Quiet Progress

North of Lake Okeechobee, hydrologic restoration has advanced with little fanfare in the $634-million Kissimmee River Restoration Project, shared equally by the Corps and South Florida Water Managament District.

The Kissimmee River once wound lazily south from Orlando through 103 miles of channel and wetlands. In the 1960s, the Corps built a canal 56 miles long for flood control, and the river’s waters were channeled directly to the lake. Converting the river to a sluice destroyed wildlife habitat and injected toxic loads of farm runoff into the lake. After two decades of controversy, the Corps agreed to restore a substantial portion of the river, and work began in 1998. It aims to backfill 22 miles of the canal’s midsection and return flow to 44 miles of the river’s original channel. Almost 20 sq miles of wetlands will be reclaimed. To date, contractors have backfilled 9.9 miles of canal and restored 18 miles of the former river channel. Work is on schedule for completion in 2012.

While restoration of the ecosystem advances, so does development that threatens it. Planned communities crowd inland from both coasts. Landowners in the Everglades Agricultural Area apply for permits to replace sugarcane fields with rock quarries. Population growth creates demand for more power plants and water supply.

Florida Power & Light Co.’s $1.2-billion West County Energy Center, a two-unit, 2,500-MW gas-turbine combined-cycle plant now under construction in Palm Beach County, is sandwiched between a former aggregate quarry and the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge. Opponents argue that the plant’s capacity will support development that will further increase pressure on the Everglades. Completion is scheduled for 2011, and FPL has applied to construct a third unit.

Conflict continues because no one is entirely satisfied with CERP’s compromises, but no one would be happy without CERP either. “The Everglades Coalition supports the [CERP] process,” insists Martin. But he adds, “We would like CERP to go in a more extensive direction….We want to see more natural areas….We need much more land than anybody’s putting aside right now.”

Until CERP can deliver on its promises, perhaps three decades from now, hope, like the Everglades ecosystem, will remain on life support.