Research assistant Jeff Absten checks the growth of turtle grass, which is returning in the 450-square-mile Florida Bay decimated by Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

Day Three: Tuesday, March 26, 1996 Sinking Treasure Conflicting interests squeeze marshes Life on the sea: Early warning went unheeded Human intervention breaks ancient rhythm Everglades' surrender is slow, sad

Everglades’ surrender
is slow, sad

By Mark Schleifstein,
Staff writer

LOOE KEY, Fla.

Diving boat Capt. Paul Moore angrily blasts his foghorn at an obviously novice snor keler standing a top a coral reef 20 yards away.
  The swimmer may not know that just touching the live coral can create scars on it that open a pathway for predators, disease and death, but ignorance is no excuse to Moore. Killing the reefs is like taking food off his table.
  In addition to producing more than $48 million a year in commercial fish and shrimp, Florida Bay and the Florida Keys barrier reef generate $463 million a year in tourist business from sport fishers and divers.
  That’s why Moore takes it personally when he sees someone damaging the reef and why he worries about the other problems threatening what once was one of the most productive and beautiful spots in the world.
  At the bottom of South Florida’s troubled Everglades ecosystem, the reefs, fish and wildlife of Florida Bay feel the full spectrum of problems that are destroying wetlands and fishing grounds around the world: urban and agricultural runoff, explosive population growth, the pressures of tourism, development and the forces of nature.
  The results present a painful lesson in what happens when the delicate connections between wetlands and coastal fisheries are disrupted, and they’ll provide a test case for society’s ability to restore them.

Surveyors with the Army Corps of Engineers hack through underbrush to monitor changes in a project that unstraightened the Kissimee River.

Fish glide around a coral head suffereing from black band disease. The disease, which might be exacerbated by pollution from Florida Bay and the Everglades, is spreading through the Florida Key.

  After years of court fights and skirmishes over who has responsibility for reviving the Everglades, the U.S. government and the sugar industry, whose plantations ring the marsh, are coming to terms on what will likely be a multibillion-dollar effort to heal the system.
  The cleanup efforts may also provide clues to the future of other valuable Gulf Coast ecosystems, including Louisi ana’s disappearing wetlands.
  For now, the people who make their living on Florida Bay can only wait for help from above — a healthy Everglades.
  About 1 million people come to South Florida each year to dive near the coral reef and marvel at the colorful fish and marine life it attracts. But divers venturing into the waters these days often find their view clouded by algae and pollutants.
  The algae thrives on waste washing into the lower Everglades system from truck farms and the Miami metropolitan area.
  Diving companies have reported widespread cancellations since word has spread that the once crystal-clear water looks like someone’s stagnant backyard swimming pool.
  Many corals on the reef, the only coral barrier reef in North America, are suffering from diseases believed caused by pollution, or possibly warmer water and more ultraviolet light caused by global warming.
  Sea grass churned up by Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and algae blooms in other sections of the bay have created dead zones of low-oxygen water that have reduced fish and shrimp crops by half or more.
  A recent study showed that waste water flushed down the toilets of homes using septic tanks in the Florida Keys reached the ocean within hours — a sure sign that at least part of the pollution attacking the reef emanates from the islands’ own residents.

'Legends tell of times when the birds used to be so plentiful they blackened the sky,' says Miccosukee Indian bobby Tigertail. Today, for reasons biologists do not fully understand, birds seldom visit vast stretches of the Everglades

  But like so much of the Gulf, the cycle of life begins in the coastal wetlands, and for Florida Bay and the Keys that means the Everglades and its water source, the Kissimmee River, 330 miles away, and just about everything in between.
  ‘‘The Keys’ ecosystem is much larger than we ever envisioned,’’ said Billy Causey, superintendent of the new Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, created in part to fight the attacks on the Keys’ habitat.

Although its thick covering of grass and lilies makes it look like a swamp, the beautiful Everglades system is actually a slow-moving river draining lower Florida.

Strangled by progress
  Florida’s Seminole and Miccosukee Indians used the word pa-hay-okee, or grassy waters, to describe the Everglades, then 40 miles wide by 100 miles long.
  The shallow waterway, sometimes only inches deep, was long misunderstood. It may look like a swamp, bit it’s actually a great river, moving fresh water at a glacier-like 100 feet a day through thick, razor-sharp saw grass on its way to the mangrove swamps that surround Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. In the process, the water is cleaned, flood water is controlled, and fish, birds and wildlife thrive in the environment.
  But then came settlers with plans for flood-protection canals and sugar plantations, and the Army Corps of Engineers with designs to take the twists and turns out of the Kissimmee River, and progress slowly began strangling the Everglades and eventually Florida Bay.
  ‘‘They drained 45,000 acres of wetlands, much of which was converted into pasture,’’ said Richard Coleman, an environmental activist who has been in the forefront of the fight to restore the river to its meandering path.
  By straightening the river, the corps reduced the flooding of cattle pastures and farmland, but destroyed the huge wetland areas that stored water above Lake Okeechobee and disrupted the natural flow of water each year into the top of the Everglades system.
  Coleman and other activists have persuaded the corps to restore the river’s flow into several river bends that were cut off by the channeling projects, and the additional water has increased the wetland characteristics of those areas, providing additional areas for fish and nesting birds.

Nutrient-rich water gushes into Florida's Everglade Nutrient Removal Project, man-made wetlands designed to remove 20 tons of phosphorus a year from canefield waste water.

  But at Lake Okeechobee, which used to spill over into the beginning of the saw grass wetlands, agricultural interests pushed for levees to prevent flooding of the sugar cane they were planting.
  When several hurricanes hit in the 1920s, causing widespread flooding, the state built a dike around the southern end of Lake Okechobee, effectively cutting off the annual flow of water into the Everglades.
  In 1928, the state completed construction of the Tamiami Trail. It was the first east-west highway to connect the Florida coasts, but it also acted as a dam, cutting the Everglades in half and limiting the amount of fresh water making it to Florida Bay.
  Hurricanes in the 1940s prompted the Corps of Engineers to build additional canals to counteract flooding, and in the process they drained an even greater area of the Everglades. In the 1960s, the corps built dikes around much of the rest of the Everglades system as additional flood controls.
  In all, between 1948 and ’71, the corps built a 2,000-mile system of levees, canals, pumping stations and hundreds of other structures, changing the natural Everglades system forever.

Seasons out of whack
  Historically, the Everglades’ wet season began in June and ran through October. Rains in the northern part of the state were stored in the Kissimmee River wetlands and Lake Okechobee. The water moved so slowly that even in wetter years, there were islands of dry land providing refuge for wildlife.
  In November, the dry season began, and the marshes began drying out. But alligator holes retained enough water to serve as oases for wildlife.
  Now half their original size, the Everglades don’t often see the sheets of water that once sustained them.
  Instead, heavy rains move through the system too rapidly, helped by the man-made canals and the channeling of the Kissimmee. The higher waters during wet months often drown large numbers of animals.
  In January 1995, in the midst of what was supposed to be the dry season, heavy rains killed hundreds of deer, raccoons, rabbits and smaller animals trapped on the Miccosukee Indian Reservation in the Everglades.
  In the drier months, the land becomes parched and susceptible to fires that burn the vegetation above ground and even the peaty soil.
  Differences in the timing of the release of water have wreaked havoc with the hatching habits of alligators and the spawning of fish, and the reduced number of fish in turn reduces the number of birds.
  The heavier rains over urban areas and sugar plantations to the north and truck farms along the eastern edge of Everglades National Park end up carrying big concentrations of fertilizer waste into the Everglades system.
  The fertilizers enhance the growth of cattails that clog out plants necessary for wildlife habitat and increase the algae in Florida Bay.
  At the same time, less fresh water reaches the bay because it is diverted to the ocean north of the bay to protect urban areas from flooding.
  The result is that a 450-square-mile swath of Florida Bay has become warmer and saltier, a dead zone during hot summer months that young fish avoid and that disrupts the growth cycle of the economically important pink shrimp.
  The fertilizer runoff has turned the bay into an algae machine, said Ron Jones, a microbiologist at Florida International University in Miami.
  When the algae die, their decomposition uses up oxygen, creating seasonal dead zones where fish can’t live.
  And then there’s sea level rise — the slow increase in the height of the water along South Florida caused by natural processes, and possibly exacerbated by global warming. As the water rises, it pushes saltier water into the mangrove forests on the edge of the Everglades system, killing some of them.
  The effects of these problems are visible all the way up the food chain. Where once birdwatchers marveled at the millions of wading birds, including egrets, blue herons and ibises at the southern end of the Everglades, the nests now are mostly abandoned, possibly because of the lack of fish in the bay area.
  Between 1985 and today, fishers dependent on species living part of their lives in Florida Bay have seen their catches cut in half.

Birds once found in the Everglades now hover around sugar plantations, whose runoff nourishes an abnormal growth of plant life, especially cattails

Trying to recover
  Public concern over the health of South Florida’s once-rich estuary has resulted in attempts to restore at least part of the Everglades’ natural water system over the past 10 years.
  The restoration efforts are both small and large:
t The Everglades Forever Act of 1994, a state law, calls for the building of artificial marshes to strain out the excess phosphorus, nitrogen and chemicals applied to the vast acres of sugar cane sandwiched between today’s Everglades federal and state parks and Lake Okeechobee.
t The corps is attempting to partially restore the flow of water in the middle of the Everglades by building a series of culverts beneath the Tamiami Trail.
President Clinton is supporting a 1-cent-per-pound tax — a reduction in the federal price support — on sugar from Florida to help pick up the tab for many of the bigger projects. That proposal will require approval from Congress.
  Peter Rosendahl, a spokesman for Flo-Sun, the state’s largest sugar producer, thinks the ultimate price tag could be as high as $10 billion for engineering all the solutions that will allow the Everglades to coexist with agriculture and the dramatically increasing population along Florida’s East Coast.
  Flo-Sun has committed spending between $4 million and $6 million a year as its share of the cost, as well as helping finance long-term studies of the health of Florida Bay.
  But the ultimate solution will be rethinking that relationship in terms that recognize the value of both, he said. Sugar plantations traditionally drained their plantations to the ocean at the first sign of rain, and often were wasteful with the water that arrived in abundance from the north. Coexistence means changing those traditions, Rosendahl said.
  ‘‘It means don’t pump water to the coast at the first sign of a cloud,’’ he said. ‘‘It means you can only use a certain amount of water and the excess must be discharged into the Everglades.’’