Draper addresses water issues during COTI meeting
Audubon Florida Executive Director Eric Draper began his presentation at the Committee of the Islands annual meeting by sharing that he thinks it is important to look at the path taken by those in the past.
“We are all walking in the footsteps of other people. Did they create something for us to move forward? We in carrying that forward are also laying down some footprints in the sand,” he said.
His presentation focused on “Keeping Water in the Watershed.”
The major issue, Draper said, is the way they are managing the 60 inches of rainfall on an annual basis, adding that the best way to store water is in swamps.
Senate Bill 10, which focuses on buying 60,000 acres of land within the Everglades Agricultural Area, for storage water reservoirs, was discussed. He said if individuals travel down to the southern portion of the Everglades system there are no longer any birds.
The lack of birds is because the natural river of grass flow of water is being cut off, so Everglades National Park is now seeing salt water coming in from the Florida Bay penetrating through the ground water and canals.
“We have organized this entire 3 million acre watershed to keep 5,000 acres of Sugar Cane farms dry during the summer and wet during the winter. That is not the way nature works in Florida,” Draper said. “We are in the middle of a drought right now. There is a fire in Big Cypress that has been burning for a month, but those sugar cane fields are wet right now.”
He said they have the ability to put huge submersible pumps into Lake Okeechobee to pump water when Lake O is too low to flow out of the Caloosahatchee River into the canals that feed into the Everglades agricultural areas.
“We are having a really hard time convincing land owners that maybe it would be a good idea that instead of doing that maybe put some reservoirs in the Everglades agricultural areas,” Draper said. “So it would be available for them during a drought, during times like this. It would make it easier to manage Lake Okeechobee.”
The state in which the Herbert Hoover Dike, which is 140 miles long, was addressed.
The rehab that is currently being done, he said, is to make it safe enough to put the amount of water that is currently allowed to carry, which is 15 and a half to 16 feet.
“Seven hundred square miles of water, 15, 16, 17 foot deep makes a huge amount of pressure,” Draper said. “If you had a major hurricane we have seen the lake rise as much as three feet over a two week period. It takes a long time to take the water out of the Caloosahatchee River. We are dealing with an unsafe levy, or dike, and a water supply plan that makes no sense at all.”
Land use was also addressed during his presentation.
Draper said Florida has 35 million acres, which mostly consists of sand on top of limestone. He said the developing strategy has been to drain the water off because 50 percent of Florida is wet.
“In doing that we have sacrificed the natural kidneys and storage facilities that have good aquifers,” he said. “My biggest priority is we have to come up with a strategy to reduce the ground water pumping, and somehow reduce the drainage to those canals.”
Water quality was also addressed, specifically fertilizer. Draper said 3 million tons of fertilizer is used a year in Florida because sandy soils are hard to grow plants. There are 10,000 tons of nitrogen fertilizer going into the Lake Okeechobee watershed on an annual basis, he said, and 5,000 tons of phosphorous fertilizer going into the watershed.
The federal limit of phosphorus in Lake Okeechobee is 105 tons.
“We are overwhelming the system with fertilizer,” Draper said.
Water quality, he said is not just an agricultural issue. The rapid growth of the state also contributes.
Florida was not designed to handle the waste load of 20 million people and 120 million people that will come and visit Florida, Draper said.