New idea to help the Everglades calls for flushing water deep underground

A new plan is emerging in the political calculus over Everglades restoration: Rather than store, treat and move water into South Florida’s parched Everglades, water managers are now considering flushing millions of gallons deep underground near Lake Okeechobee.

The deep injection wells would help control the level of water in the lake during the rainy season, protect its aging dike and help eliminate the need to flush dirty lake water to either coast, which last year outraged residents and business owners when it triggered smelly toxic blooms and killed fish. But environmentalists say it would do nothing to help fix the south end of the Everglades and instead waste valuable water that original restoration plans called for saving.

“If we inject that water underground, we only take care of half the problem,” said Audubon Florida scientist Paul Gray. “The scale that we’re talking about here has never been contemplated or done before . ... We’re talking something very untested.”

They also worry the plan is meant to undermine a push to build a massive reservoir south of the lake backed by Republican Senate President Joe Negron, whose hometown has been hammered by the lake releases, but opposed by powerful sugar farmers.

At a meeting Wednesday, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is in the midst of mapping out fixes for the Lake Okeechobee watershed, provided an update on alternatives in a planning process expected to take three years. While solving the water storage problem relies heavily on building a series of reservoirs around the lake the plans also call for constructing wells that store and recover water as well as the injection wells that dump water in the boulder zone beneath the Florida aquifer.

About 300 recovery wells, called ASRs, were originally part of restoration efforts. But an 11-year study concluded so many wells would likely lead to pressure problems and proposed scaling back the number to about 130, with 80 near the lake.

To make up for that lost storage, water managers in January resurrected the decade-old idea of flushing water into the injection wells.

Up to 15 millions gallons of water per day could be dumped at each site, said Bob Verrastro, the district’s lead hydrologist. If just 30 to 60 were placed around the lake, lake water levels could be reduced by a half foot to a foot every year, he said. The technology is widely used by utilities around the state that pump wastewater from sewer treatment