Army Corps of Engineers open to ag land flow-way for Lake Okeechobee

By SUZANNE WENTLEY
suzanne.wentley@scripps.com
January 31, 2006

Talk of moving more water south from Lake Okeechobee through the Everglades
Agricultural Area isn't anything new - unless it's coming from a top
official with the Army Corps of Engineers.
But that's exactly what Dennis Duke, the corps' project manager for
ecosystem restoration, said needs to happen.

"You've got to have flow-ways through the EAA," Duke said. "It's not just
necessary, it's a requirement. It's an abomination what we've done to the
natural system."
Calls for new ways to move water south of the lake - instead of flushing it
into the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers - have been part of the
Everglades restoration discussion for years. After last year's poor water
conditions, even more environmental activists signed on to the idea.

Duke's comments, which were first expressed last week at the annual
Everglades Coalition conference, came as a pleasant surprise to river
advocates who've become used to quick dismissal of the idea.

"That was the first time I heard that being proposed by an agency, the
potential for some kind of flow-way," said Mark Perry, executive director of
the Florida Oceanographic Society. "We're excited. This is the start of a
dialogue that can move us in the right direction."

In an interview Monday, Duke said he supported a flow-way through the sugar
fields as a way to move more water from the lake into a large reservoir
being built in the southern end of the fields and the stormwater treatment
areas, which state water managers plan to expand beginning later this month.

The southern flow would be especially important if the hundreds of proposed
underground aquifer water storage wells don't work, he said.

But Duke's concept of a flow-way differs from what Perry and other activists
envision.

Perry said a flow-way should be a wide, shallow area with plants, which
would help clean polluting nutrients from the water while slowly moving it
south toward the Everglades.

Duke said the flow-way should be a significantly larger canal - maybe an
additional 100 to 200 feet across - that can move water quickly away from
the lake and the estuaries.

"We're going to have to fix the southern end of the lake even if we provide
more storage to the north, to get more water south," he said. "And it needs
to be more environmentally friendly than flushing it with large pumps."

Although he announced the idea at the coalition meeting, Duke said it needed
to be studied before water managers accepted it as an official goal.

The idea is often rebuked, he added, because it comes across as "buy the EAA
because we don't like sugar."

But water managers and activists agree the future of the 700,000-acre
agricultural area is critical to Everglades restoration, Perry said.

"I don't care if it were potatoes growing in there, or if it were corn or
wheat," he said. "Environmentally, it wouldn't matter what kind of crop.
It's blocking the sheet flow that was prior to agriculture there. We need to
get it back."