This month’s Rivers Coalition meeting was held just five days after the Army Corps of Engineers started discharging water from Lake Okeechobee down the St. Lucie Canal and into our estuary. A standing room-only audience came to the Stuart City Hall to find out “Why?”

Col. James Booth from the ACE explained that the Corps has several missions with regard to managing the lake. Until earlier this month, they had been prioritizing their Environmental Protection mission. However, the lake level failed to go down during the “dry season” and, in fact, has been slowly rising since mid-December. This put the lake level several feet higher than it should be at this stage, which in turn suggested it was very likely to be dangerously-high in June when the “wet season” begin. The Corps thus felt it necessary to prioritize another of their missions – Flood Prevention and Human Safety – which meant they had to start discharging water from the lake.

The specific numbers: The lake level is currently 16.4 feet. It should be no higher than 14.5 feet at this time of year. The Corps has therefore scheduled a series of discharges down the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie Canals and through outlets to the south that should bring the level down to 14.5 feet by April 1.

Several critical points emerged during the presentation:

1) ALL the water that flows south – which is where we want it to go -- MUST go through a Storm Treatment Area. 90% of the water in the STA’s, though, comes from the Everglades Agricultural Area – Big Sugar – and only 10% from the lake. The EAA – Big Sugar – is thus not bearing their fair share of the adverse impacts of the discharges.

2) A multi-billion dollar project of reinforcing the dike around Lake Okeechobee has now been completed. Before that, the “limited risk” lake level was 18.5 feet and the critical level was 21 feet.  Congressman Mast pointed out that obviously those levels were now higher than that and asked just how much higher they were. Col. Booth could not provide the answer. (Obviously, higher risk levels would reduce, perhaps greatly, or even eliminate the Corps’ need to do discharges.)

The bottom line, though, is that discharges down the St. Lucie Canal and into our estuary have begun. Hopefully, the environmental damage will be minimal, but that is something we will know only in the fullness of time.

To end on a positive note: Jacqui Thurlow-Lippisch, our local environmental heroine, pointed out that Col. Booth and SFWMD Executive Director Drew Bartlett both attended the Rivers Coalition meeting in person to listen to and address our concerns. Their willingness to reach out to us is a big and much-appreciated change from the way it was several years ago. As long as there is dialogue there is hope…

-- Walter Deemer