Wednesday, November 1, 2006
ARMY CORPS: Fla. river's rebirth lifts spirits of beleaguered agency

Daniel Cusick, Greenwire Southeast reporter
BASINGER, Fla. --

Florida's Kissimmee River is an exception. Forty-five years after the Army Corps of Engineers turned the swampy, snaking 103-mile waterway and its sprawling floodplain into a 56-mile straight chute called the C-38 Canal, the corps' dredges are back -- this time, working on nature's behalf.

"We're making serious changes in the way we operate here," said Dennis Duke, chief of restoration programs for the corps' Jacksonville District, which along with the South Florida Water Management District, oversees the $578 million Kissimmee project as well as the behemoth Everglades restoration.

With the backfilling of the C-38 Canal (background), the historic Kissimmee River channel (foreground) has been reconnected to its water supply, resulting in a more shallow, meandering river that supports native wildlife and offers other benefits such as natural flood control and water filtering. Photo courtesy of the South Florida Water Management District.

But while the corps is rescuing the Kissimmee, the project may also help rescue the corps whose reputation has taken a pounding in recent years as it stumbled from one crisis to another.

The Army Corps' marquee restoration effort in the Everglades, for example, has endured technical problems and bureaucratic delays that raised total estimated project costs to $10.9 billion -- up 30 percent from the $8.2 billion that Congress authorized six years ago (E&ENews PM, Sept. 25).

Other projects have come under fire from taxpayer watchdog groups, environmentalists and the agency's own overseers. Concerns in Congress about the corps' environmental and financial practices are in part responsible for delaying passage of the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA), which authorizes funding for civil works projects. Lawmakers have been unable to complete a water resources bill since 2000.

Finally, Hurricane Katrina exposed fatal weaknesses in the corps' design and construction of the New Orleans' flood protection system. The corps issued a report in June admitting the levees were built haphazardly (E&ENews PM, June 1).

But the corps is bragging about the Kissimmee project, which officials say shows what the agency can accomplish when given the right planning and enough money to finish the job. The corps and state officials showcased the project for reporters last month in a daylong series of tours.

So far, the corps has filled 7.5 miles of canal and reconnected nearly 15 miles of the river's natural channel that had been walled off by earthen levees. Remarkable things are happening in the restored sections.

Wading birds and waterfowl have returned by between 30- and 90-fold. Native fish have also returned as the 30-foot-deep canal has been replaced by a shallower, sandy-bottomed riverbed. Sportfishers have reported a huge influx of bass, bluegill and sunfish in places where the channelized river supported only two species, bowfin and gar.

"It's far greater than we expected when we started," said Joe Koebel, a senior scientist with the South Florida Water Management District. "It doesn't take long. Mother Nature is very forgiving."

'Get the water right'
By 2012 -- if all continues to go well -- the Kissimmee is expected to slither again across 27,000 acres of prairie that today is home to some of the largest cow-calf operations in the United States. Levees that once corralled the Kissimmee River into a series of interlocking pools will be leveled and graded, allowing water to flow freely. And downed trees and snags will be reintroduced, encouraging backflows and annual floods that are essential to wading birds, fish and other wildlife.

Finally, at the river's headwaters, Lake Kissimmee, which is about 60 miles south of Orlando, the corps is allowing water levels to fluctuate by as much as one-and-a-half feet to improve habitat for fish and wildlife that require seasonal variations in water temperatures, elevation and flow.

In sum, officials say, the Kissimmee project is a back-to-the-past solution to one of Florida's most intractable environmental problems, one that speaks to the essence of a phrase often heard in this part of the country: "Get the water right."

Getting the water right is not terribly complicated in the Kissimmee. Traveling by airboat up C-38 near the abandoned Fort Kissimmee and the Air Force's Avon Park bombing range, it is easy to see where the canal is giving way to the old river.

The corps is boring into the canal walls, sometimes 100 yards or more, to reconnect the Kissimmee to its original channel and floodplain. The work requires heavy excavating equipment and fleets of off-highway dump trucks to move more than 1 million cubic yards of dirt and organic material.

Workers excavate 40-year-old dredge material along the Kissimmee River to restore the floodplain to its original contours. The dredge material was placed along the river during construction of the C-38 canal between 1962 and 1971. Photo by Daniel Cusick.

"It doesn't exactly conjure up what most people think of environmental restoration," said Chuck Wilburn, a corps' civil engineer and Kissimmee project manager.

Some of the most important restoration results are not immediately visible. Unseen, for example, is the re-establishing of aquatic invertebrates that represent the most fundamental building blocks of aquatic ecosystems. These passive filter feeders are hugely important because they capture sediment and other tiny particles from the water column, thus reducing its pollutant load.

During baseline studies on the Kissimmee in the early 1990s, scientists found such passive filter feeders accounted for just 1 percent of all aquatic invertebrates in the river. Today, with flows restored, they represent 30 percent of aquatic invertebrates and are expected to become even more abundant as the ecological system recovers.

Paul Gray, director of the Audubon Society's Lake Okeechobee program, said the Kissimmee restoration is "one step in many things we have to do" to recover the health of the 750-square-mile lake, which suffers from severe oxygen depletion due to nitrogen and phosphorus runoff from upstream farms and other developments.

Scientists have noted that if Lake Okeechobee continues to decline, there is little hope of achieving the broader goals of Everglades restoration because the glades' primary water source will be fouled.

Returning 27,000 acres of pasture to wetlands in the Kissimmee River Basin should have a powerful filtering effect for much of that pollution, as will the state's conservation purchase of more than 100,000 acres in the basin, much of it near the river's headwaters south of Orlando.

Gray said he is optimistic that the Kissimmee's success so far bodes well for the broader South Florida ecosystem. "When the water is right out there, and it's not quite right yet, the river has been really, really nice at times," he said.

Implications for Everglades restoration
But the broader question remains: Can the corps and its state partners parlay their success on the Kissimmee to the Everglades south of Lake Okeechobee?

Portions of the restored Kissimmee River have reclaimed their premier status as feeding grounds for wading birds. During the years of channelization, much of the river's wading bird and waterfowl habitat was destroyed, resulting in a precipitous decline in both species diversity and abundance. Photo courtesy of the South Florida Water Management District.

James Murley, director of the Joint Center for Environmental and Urban Problems at Florida Atlantic University/Florida International University, said it will be difficult to replicate the Kissimmee's achievements in the broader Everglades project, which is known as the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP).

"I don't mean to demean what has been successfully accomplished [on the Kissimmee]," Murley said. "But there is not the same kind of interface between restoration goals and urban growth as we see in South Florida, and certainly it isn't a test of all the issues that different projects under CERP will have to face."

Much of the restoration work in CERP requires trade-offs that are inherently more complex than what officials faced in the Kissimmee River Basin, where the primary economic activity is ranching and other low-density agriculture. CERP projects slated for South Florida's urbanized counties must contend with development sprawling from Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach.

Among the key "interface" issues in urbanized parts of the Everglades are finding the proper balance between drinking water supply and water for wildlife, and the backpumping of polluted stormwater from farm fields and urban areas into the Everglades. Few of these issues will be resolved without considerable back-and-forth between stakeholder groups.

On the other hand, Murley said, the Kissimmee project proves large-scale environmental restoration can succeed through proper planning and the right mix of federal, state and local cooperation. The project "provides everybody with an excellent example that is consistent with CERP's overall goals of 'get the water right, get the land right,'" he said.

Greg May, director of the interagency South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Task Force, which oversees the state's federally funded restoration projects, agreed.

"When you're flying south from Orlando and you see the remnants of the C-38 Canal, and then you see this floodplain 10 or 12 miles across with water from tree line to tree line and you can't tell which parts are manmade and which parts are natural, that's an amazing thing," May said.

"It gives everybody great hope because the ecological recovery has happened much faster than many people anticipated," May added. "None of it was easy, but it shows we can overcome problems as they arise."