Environmentalists cry foul when South Florida Water Management District back-pumps floodwater into Lake Okeechobee to spare wildlife and threatened Glades communities.
But you hear not a single enviro's peep about the untreated storm water flowing from Martin County INTO Lake O.
Yes, that's what I said. The bad stuff is going backwards.
This has been going on for years, apparently. When the lake level is below 14 feet and the C-44 is higher than the lake, water is back-flowed into Okeechobee instead of being sent through the St. Lucie Lock and out to sea via the estuary.
Who knew?
Probably not Bullsugar.org President Kenny Hinkle Jr. Hinkle complained June 26 on WPTV because the Water Management District was back-pumping water into the south side of Lake Okeechobee.
Water pumped out of the Glades was clean-treated water, incidentally.
"My concern is, it's going to feed another algal bloom like we had last summer," Hinkle told TV viewers on the Treasure Coast. "It's going to feed all those nutrients from the nitrogen and phosphorous and feed a new algal bloom that could potentially come my way."
But here are the facts for Hinkle and everybody else:
Since June 5, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers chose to flow almost 70,000 acre feet of runoff from the St. Lucie River back into Lake O, rather than east through the estuary. That's 22.6 billion gallons. As I said, we're talking about untreated local basin runoff.
Remember, the heavy flow of water in the St. Lucie watershed in June, which flushed out the canals in the watershed after the drought, was likely even “dirtier” than average.
Whereas District inflows from the south concluded July 5, the Corps' flows from the St. Lucie are continuing.
Have a look at the SFWMD table below to compare sources and quantity of water entering Lake O.
SFWMD spokesman Randy Smith said tests showed the water being back-pumped into the lake from the south was relatively low in phosphorus. Most of it had already been treated by the District flowing it through marshes, which absorb some of the nutrients from the water.
Neither John Campbell nor Jennifer Miller, spokespeople at the Corps of Engineers, were available Tuesday to explain more.
Have you heard a single biologist discuss the back-flowing of polluted water from Martin County's C-44 basin as a contributing source of lake pollution? More to the point, how much more is Martin contributing to its own pollution than we realized previously?
Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or at 228-282-2423. Twitter: @NancyLBSmith
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