Rivers Coalition - Save our River, Stop the Discharges - Dedicated to restoring and preserving our St. Lucie River!

How To Kill A Perfectly Good Florida River

Carl Hiaasen

October 9, 2005

The killing of the St. Lucie River is deplorable but hardly unique.
Other Florida rivers are being destroyed, although the symptoms aren't
so arresting.

The St. Lucie is dying as a manmade slime trail, a huge vein of effluent
streamed with blue-green algae. The remaining fish are increasingly sick
and ulcerated, the birds have flown and residents of neighboring
counties are being warned to keep their children away from the water.

Unlike some of Florida's rivers -- poisoned slowly by mines and paper
mills
-- the St. Lucie is dying very publicly, and in a heavily populated
region.
Many thousands of people live on or near the waterway, and some are
protesting loudly.

It's uncomfortable for state authorities. Often a river can be killed
off without much fuss; only a few stout souls in mill towns dare to
protest, and the enviros downstream don't get much play in the local
media.

But the St. Lucie is different. Palm Beach County TV stations have been
avidly covering the story, sending up helicopters -- helicopters! -- to
take video of the churning crud.

This is bad. This is ugly stuff.

The source is Lake Okeechobee, a humongous latrine for ranches, farms,
groves and, more recently, massive residential developments in Central
Florida.

For decades the state has tolerated the dumping of cattle manure,
pesticides and fertilizers into the big lake. Tons of foul sediment were
stirred up by last year's hurricanes, and water is now being pumped at
up to 26,000 gallons per second into the St. Lucie River.

Water managers blame the weather. Months of heavy rain have forced them
to keep flushing Lake Okeechobee so it won't overflow, they say. The
runoff can't be sent elsewhere because the high phosphorus levels exceed
the limits imposed for the Everglades restoration project.

So where does all that bad water go? Down the Caloosahatchee River to
the Gulf of Mexico, and down the St. Lucie to the Atlantic.

What the good people of Martin and St. Lucie counties see and smell on
their river is the disastrous culmination of generations of lousy
planning, worse management and slimy politics.

Florida has a squalid record of letting special interests exploit and
contaminate our public waterways, and the state remains an unfailingly
enthusiastic partner in such pollution.

Georgia-Pacific, which empties up to 36 million gallons of crap every
day into a creek near Palatka, now has a permit to pipe its waste
directly to the St. Johns River. Meanwhile, International Paper Co. in
Pensacola has a green light to build an outfall pipe to wetlands along
Perdido Bay.

The most outrageous case is in Taylor County, up in Florida's Big Bend.
There the Buckeye paper mill, which manufactures fluff for disposable
diapers, has annihilated virtually all life in the once-teeming
Fenholloway River.

In a grievously belated attempt to restore the Fenholloway to a
''fishable-swimmable'' waterway, the state has brilliantly decided to
let Buckeye pipe its toxins straight to the Gulf of Mexico, a swath of
which has already been deadened by noxious dumping.

For these upcoming atrocities you can thank pro-industry stooges at the
federal Environmental Protection Agency, and also Florida's assiduously
gutless Department of Environmental Protection (the former chief, David
Struhs, left for a job at International Paper). The rivers will go black
before any Bush brother notices.

Rather than requiring big companies and governments to clean their
waste, it's much easier (and cheaper) to pipe it somewhere less
noticeable.
Somebody would have already suggested that remedy for the St. Lucie
River were it feasible to build a sewer pipe from Lake Okeechobee to the
sea.

With property values along the St. Lucie in jeopardy and much of the
river unsafe for human recreation, plenty of folks in Martin and St.
Lucie counties are angry.

Officials of the South Florida Water Management District say that
they're at the mercy of the rains and of the timetable for Everglades
restoration.

On the drawing board is the C-44 reservoir, which supposedly will
cleanse about 13 billion gallons of Lake Okeechobee poo before it
reaches the St.
Lucie.

Unfortunately, the project isn't due for completion until 2010, and many
fear it will be too late. The Martin County commission has discussed
suing the water district for wrecking the St. Lucie, and similar action
is being considered by a group called the Rivers Coalition.

Meanwhile, the Stuart-Martin Chamber of Commerce has enlisted a bigtime
lawyer, Willie Gary, to join the river battle. Gary lives along the St.
Lucie and has offered his counsel for free, which is not happy news for
the state.

In what many residents perceive as a blunt threat, some water managers
have suggested that litigation could result in the postponement of the
C-44 reservoir construction. In other words: Shut up, be patient and
trust us.

It's not easy.

The history of Florida waters is one of greedy abuse and neglect. Surely
there must be a way to save the Everglades without killing the rivers
that border it.

The ruination of Lake Okeechobee took 70 years, but the St. Lucie is
deteriorating much faster. Completion of the filtering reservoir is a
minimum of five years away, which is an awfully long time to wait if
you're a kid who wants to fish or go swimming.

An awfully long time to sit by and watch a river die.