Building a reservoir will not stop Lake O, coastal discharges

Kimberly Mitchell’s Dec. 28 Point of View column claims that America’s Everglades are “collapsing from lack of clean freshwater.” Where has she been? The agency in charge of restoration (South Florida Water Management District) has shown that 100 percent of Everglades National Park already is meeting the stringent 10 parts per billion water-quality standard. In other words, “clean.” During the 10 months of Lake O discharges, the Everglades were well above flood stage due to excessive rainfall throughout the region. There’s no lack of water anywhere when the lake is so high that discharges are required.

Arguing for building a reservoir on currently productive farmland south of the lake because “the Everglades remains too dry in all but the wettest years” is utter fantasy. It’s only in these wettest years that large lake releases are made to the estuaries, and the Everglades cannot take any water that might be funneled to the proposed reservoir. During the dry years when the Everglades may need water, a reservoir would not be used since any water that is available would be sent directly to the Everglades. Putting water in a reservoir upstream of the Everglades in a dry year is a waste of water.

Apparently, the upcoming Everglades Coalition Conference needs to include a refresher course in basic reasoning and basic math. Consider the 2013 and 2016 excess water discharges to the coastal estuaries as a simple math-reason equation:

■ 5,000 square miles of watershed north of Lake O drains into a 730-squaremile lake.

■ Water enters Lake O six times faster than it can be discharged. With a fragile dike, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers discharges water east and west as the flood control system was designed.

■ 4.5 million acre-feet of water in 2013 was discharged to the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee estuaries, and more than 5 million acre-feet was discharged in 2016.

■ A 60,000-acre reservoir south of the lake could hold up to 300,000 acre-feet of water. (During both years, the Everglades to the south was also flooded and could not take any more water when lake releases are made. So the proposed reservoir fills up, and still over 4.2 million acrefeet of water would be discharged to the estuaries.

As for Florida Bay, scientific data shows that its average annual water need is only another 100,000 acre feet or so. So you cannot “redirect” any significant amount of water currently discharged to the east and west to Florida Bay during these wet events either. “One solution for three estuaries.” Not.

Perhaps the most appalling bit of fiction is that the Everglades was drained for sugar cane farmers (there was little sugar cane at the time of the major flood control and drainage projects) and that farmers and farming communities south of Lake Okeechobee are “in the way” of water flowing the way it did historically. The dike around the lake, well as the dikes protecting the suburban areas of western Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties and the myriad canals that drain urban neighborhoods to the ocean are part of the same regional flood control system.

No one is seriously considering taking down these dikes and drainage, and letting South Florida return to swamp. Farming communities, as well as urban and suburban neighborhoods and businesses, all deserve the same consideration.