This canal has been polluting Biscayne Bay for decades
Project will help clean it up
one of South Florida’s usual summer deluges, the banks of the
Black Creek Canal swell, sending a torrent of gross, polluted water into alreadyailing Biscayne Bay, sometimes sparking fish kills.
South Florida officials finally have money to help fix that. And on Tuesday, the final project in a 20year mission to clean up the dirty water flowing from the canal officially kicked off in Cutler Bay at Black Point Marina.
At a press event for the groundbreaking, MiamiDade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said the project will help protect South Florida from saltwater pushing west, strengthen the coast against sea rise, offer stronger storm-surge protection and restore
wetland ecosystems.
“It is the last piece of our Everglades restoration for this region,” she said.
Charlie Martinez, the representative for MiamiAfter
Dade on the South Florida Water Management District governing board, called it a “major part of the Central Everglades Restoration Project that helps Biscayne Bay, which we all know is in dire straits.”
The goal of the $369 million Biscayne Bay Coastal Wetlands project is to use stormwater pumps, narrow canals and holes cut under roads to slow down the flow of water from major canals into Biscayne Bay and divert it to flow in a thin layer across acres of mangroves instead. That type of water flow mimics the natural system before Miami was built, and experts hope it will restore the mangroves that armor the coast while cleaning the polluted water.
The final few projects, including installing some new pumps, are on track to be finished in 2025.
Eleven years ago, the pilot version of this project came online at the Deering Estate. Since then, freshwater species such as pond apples and sawgrass are back. Salinity levels in the groundwater nearby have dropped dramatically.
More wading birds and fish are thriving in the mangroves. And perhaps most spectacularly for the dredged and drained South Florida, a natural spring burbling fresh water has reappeared.
“We’ve seen significant improvement,” said Bahram Charkhian, site manager for the Biscayne Bay Coastal Wetlands project for the water-management district.
With the latest (and hopefully, last) infusion of cash for this project, planners hope to see similar results near Black Point Marina and at a site farther south. Collectively, this project is supposed to rehydrate 1,700 acres of wetlands and reinforce three miles of mangrove
studded shoreline, the largest such project in South Florida Water Management District history.
“We’ve never done anything on this scale we’re talking about today,” said Craig Grossenbacher, chief of the waterresources coordination division at Miami-Dade County DERM.
It also lays the groundwork for the other half of the equation for restoring Biscayne Bay, an Army Corps of Engineers project known as Biscayne Bay Southeastern Everglades Ecosystem Restoration or BBSEER.
If the wetlands project is about cleaning and slowing down the rush of water into Biscayne Bay, BBSEER is about finding more water to send into the thirsty bay, which was starved of its natural flow of water when humans drained the Everglades.
“When we’re talking about bringing water south, we’re also talking about bringing water southeast,” said Irela Bagué, Miami-Dade’s chief bay officer. “Either we find the water or we make the water, but we need the water.”
But the road to get that water into the bay comes with speed bumps, including a decision late last year by the Miami-Dade County Commission to allow more intensive development on a piece of farmland earmarked for BBSEER projects.
In January, the state threw a question mark into the process and asked the county to look again at its approval process, potentially setting up a new vote with a new commission.
“Biscayne Bay is our Mount Rushmore. It is our Central Park. We need to protect it,” Martinez said. “It is imperiled by an ill-fated decision made by a few Dade County commissioners last year.”
Without the key land needed for Everglades and Biscayne Bay restoration, he said the hundreds of millions spent so far would be “an effort in futility.”
“If you’re given the opportunity to prioritize Biscayne Bay over special interests, do it,” he said. “Help us, don’t work against us.”