Environment

Releases of Lake O's polluted water now welcomed by environmental group

WGCU | By Tom Bayles

Published April 8, 2024 at 9:59 AM EDT

When the Army Corps stopped releasing millions of gallons of water down the Caloosahatchee River to lower the level of Lake Okeechobee, weather conditions changed, leaving the waterway nearly stagnant without water flowing from the lake toward the Gulf of Mexico; so the releases have resumed, but at a lesser rate

Sometimes all it takes is one tiny shake-up in an ecosystem to shift many opinions on a much larger environmental concern.

In this case, the change of heart is that releases of polluted water from Lake Okeechobee into the Caloosahatchee River are no longer a near-apocalypse happening, but rather a beneficial event for the environmentally weary watershed.

The Army Corps has been releasing millions of gallons of water a day from Lake O for more than a month, and the excessively nutrient-rich water was poised to create ecosystem-wide havoc along the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers where the water was flowing hard.

“Last week we conducted a six-weeks, Lake Okeechobee release schedule, which was intended to lower the lake in preparation for the forecasted extreme activity within the Atlantic hurricane season,” Corey Bell, the Army Corps deputy commander for South Florida, said Friday. Then “we have made the decision to pause larger releases to allow the downstream ecosystems to recover.”

Then something not so funny happened on the way to Hurricane Season 2024 set to kick off June 1.

“Getting water out of the lake within the healthy flow envelope is a good thing because Lake Okeechobee is too high right now."

Dave Andrews, director of Captains For Clean Water

“Officials are forecasting (dozens of) named storms, the highest forecast ever released,” Bell said. “Conditions contributing to these more intense predictions were temperatures above all historical averages, and the change from El Nino to Nino, a strong African westerly jet stream, and the changes in the locations and strength of steering winds locally.”

As soon as lake water releases into the Caloosahatchee River were paused, “conditions have gotten very, very, very, quickly dry and the canal is almost entirely stagnate,” Bell said, adding that the Army Corps decided to take preventative measures and resume flows to the west.

Dave Andrews, the director of Captains For Clean Water, whose members just a week ago were writing nasty reflections on the heavy releases of the same water to the Army Corps, is now welcoming the water, albeit at less of a rush.

“It helps balance the salinity in the upper estuary, which is ultimately beneficial for the water quality in the Caloosahatchee,” Andrews said. “Getting water out of the lake within the healthy flow envelope is a good thing because Lake Okeechobee is too high right now, so lowering it by sending beneficial flows, that is really a benefit to us in helping to avoid a potentially toxic summer like we saw in 2018.”

For now, at least, it seems the Army Corps has found a Goldilocks zone for releasing lake water that is just right.