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Back to nature on the Kissimmee River Daphne Sashin | Sentinel Staff Writer |
Posted October 12, 2006
Phase 2
Organized in 4 phases, the $578 million Kissimmee River restoration project
aims to return flow to 43 miles of the river's historic, meandering path by
2012. Besides providing habitat for fish and wildlife, the wetlands that are
re-created will help filter out pollutants now carried to Lake Okeechobee
and the Everglades. Phase 1 was finished in 2001.
During Phase 2:
- 1.9 miles of channel will be filled in with dirt
- 4 miles of the river's historic route will be restored
- 2.5 million to 3 million cubic yards of dirt are being put back into the
channel
- 18 cubic yards of dirt in a single truckload
- Cost is projected at $27.6 million
- Construction is to be finished December 2007
ON THE KISSIMMEE RIVER -- Back and forth, all day long, mammoth yellow dump
trucks take on loads of dirt from the 10-foot-high mound that's been sitting
next to the Kissimmee River for 40 years, left behind by dredges that turned
the once-meandering river into a straight-walled canal.
One by one, they drive to the river's edge and dump the soil so bulldozers
can push it into the water.
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Meanwhile, just upstream, a dredge sucks out mud and decayed plant matter
from the original riverbed, spewing a brown fountain of muck into the canal
where the earth is being dumped.
This is the latest phase in a $578 million federal and state project to
return the river's midsection back to the way it used to be, before the Army
Corps of Engineers turned the winding, 103-mile river into a 56-mile canal
for the sake of flood control.
The goal is to fill in almost two miles of the artificial canal near the
Avon Park Air Force Range and create four miles of curving pathway for the
river water. By the end of next year, crews will have moved enough earth to
fill a train of dump trucks stretching from Orlando to Washington, D.C.
"The average person can't comprehend how much earth work is actually being
done," Corps engineer Chuck Wilburn said. "Most people talk about leveling
their home site or getting it ready to build a house. That stuff takes a
half a day or a day's worth of earth work."
The 13-year river restoration requires the Corps of Engineers to fill in 22
miles of the canal with dirt that has sat beside the river since the agency
dug it out in the 1960s. Construction crews must also dredge and reconnect
nine miles of the river's original curves, which went stagnant and filled
with decaying plant matter when they were cut off from the main channel.
In allowing water to flood the old bends, water-management officials expect
to turn 26,500 acres of pasture back into habitat-rich marshes. Where the
mountains of dirt once sat, seeds that have been buried in the ground for 40
years will come back to life.
"We're not planting one single piece of vegetation," Wilburn said. "As soon
as you take that material off and get the water back on it . . . the grass
comes back."
Besides providing habitat for hundreds of species of fish and wildlife, the
wetlands that are re-created along the river will help filter out pollutants
now carried to Lake Okeechobee.
Engineers spent decades trying to figure the best way to reverse the
ecological damage the Corps caused when it gouged a massive drainage ditch
through the river's shallow maze. They knew they couldn't fill in the entire
canal because that would flood the communities above and below the river,
Kissimmee and St. Cloud to the north and Okeechobee to the south.
"It's not just a matter of putting it back the way it was," said Stuart
Appelbaum, chief of the planning division for the Corps' Jacksonville
district. "It was a long process to figure out what needed to be done."
The first phase of the restoration, completed in 2001, plugged seven miles
of the channel with dirt and returned flow to 15 miles of the river's
historic, meandering path.
Biologists with the South Florida Water Management District were amazed how
quickly wildlife returned to the flood plain. Scientists this year observed
three times the number of wading birds and 10 times the number of ducks they
expected based on their understanding of conditions in the 1940s and '50s.
"It's a tremendous response," district biologist Joe Koebel said.
In July, construction crews returned to the river for another round of earth
moving. For now, the contractor has about three dozen employees working
10-hour days to get the job done.
"It is kind of counter-intuitive, because it looks so mechanized and
manmade," said Bill Graf, a spokesman for the South Florida Water Management
District. "It's almost like you have to mess it all up again to get it back
to nature."
Two excavators scrape truckloads of earth from the mountain, with an
inspector from the Air Force Range on hand to check for unexploded bombs
that may have fallen into it. Half a dozen dump trucks drive back and forth
across the mound, hauling loads of dirt to the river's edge where bulldozers
push the piles into the water.
A mile up the river, in one of the old curves, another contractor sits
inside a barge. The machine sucks muck and weeds into a pipe that runs
across the mountain of dirt and spills into the canal.
If everyone does their job, years from now, no one will know a canal was
ever there.