State: Everglades murk may get worse

In its latest criticism, a National Academy of Sciences panel said Thursday that a plan for restoring the flow of water through what is left of the Everglades is not likely to achieve an important benefit touted by its political backers: the transformation of murky Florida Bay into the fishing paradise it was in the 1970s.

The report is only the panel's most recent criticism of the massive effort to replumb the River of Grass. Last year the panel raised questions about using an untested form of water storage, questions that prompted the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the South Florida Water Management District to launch new studies of whether it would really work.

The panel's latest report focuses on Florida Bay, at the southern tip of the Everglades, and says the Everglades plan could actually worsen the bay's condition.

While the plan calls for restoring the flow of fresh water through the Everglades, there is no assurance the water will be cleaned up before it reaches Florida Bay.

As a result, increasing the flow is likely to dump nitrogen and phosphorous into the shallow estuary, the panel from the National Academy of Sciences said. That will feed algae blooms that would decrease water clarity, making the bay even murkier than it is now, the panel predicted.

"It could be we need to do more with water quality protection," said David Rudnick, a senior scientist with the South Florida Water Management District, one of the agencies implementing the restoration plan.

The Everglades plan's implied promise to bring back gin-clear water "may not be realistic, and there's some uncertainty about whether it's even possible," said Stephen Humphrey, dean of the College of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Florida and part of the 15-member panel reviewing the project.

Thursday's report did not surprise the plan's architects at the Army Corps of Engineers .

"We clearly wanted to put more of the historical flows into Florida Bay," said Stu Appelbaum, who is in charge of the restoration plan for the corps. "But as we pointed out, there are a lot of unknowns about Florida Bay."

Originally the Everglades was a moving sheet of water that spilled over from Lake Okeechobee and swept southward to empty into Florida Bay, which covers 850 square miles but averages 3 feet deep.

At low tide, the bay's mud flats provided a valuable feeding area for wading birds. Vast seagrass beds thrived in the shallows, providing food and habitat for snook, tarpon, permit and other fish. The hard bottom was home to corals and sponges.

But over the past 100 years the flow was curtailed by the Tamiami Trail, then redirected by the Army's efforts to protect South Florida's sprawl from flooding. Now a complex web of canals, pumps and levees shuttle water away to the sea.

Although increasingly salty, Florida Bay still drew anglers from around the world who were attracted by its fabulous fishing and its crystal waters. Then, in the summer of 1987, about 100,000 acres of seagrass died off. Algae blooms and sponge die-offs followed, spoiling the water's clarity. The population of fish, shrimp, sponges and other creatures declined.

Fishing guides, tourism officials, environmental activists and government agencies all agreed something should be done.

"The collapse of Florida Bay helped catalyze Everglades restoration in the first place," said Nancy Klingener, Florida Keys program manager for the Ocean Conservancy. "The one point we all agree on is that it needs clean water."

One of the arguments for pushing the $8-billion Everglades restoration plan through Congress and the Legislature was that it also would fix Florida Bay by restoring the flow of fresh water into the bay.

The plan has been politically popular, attracting support from politicians of both parties. But some prominent scientists have been sharply critical, arguing that the plan will supply water for South Florida's population to double but not really restore the Everglades.

So in 1999 Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt asked the National Academy of Sciences to set up an independent panel to review the plan over the next five years.

The report the science panel issued Thursday says that the long-term effects of the restoration on Florida Bay "is uncertain." However, increasing the fresh water flow is likely to "result in a larger net flux of nitrogen and phosphorous out of the Everglades."

That will "increase nutrient loading to the bay," the report says, and the result will be "an increase in phytoplankton blooms and a decrease in water clarity." Those changes "will be viewed by many as undesirable."

The panel called for increased research, not only into what the Everglades plan would do to the bay but also into what the bay was like before humans tampered with it. There is some indication that, at the turn of the century, the water was not as clear as in the 1970s.

"There's a pretty good consensus among the scientists that that gin-clear water was an anomaly," Rudnick said. But reproducing that clarity "is aesthetically pleasing, and the public may value that so much that it may drive our goals."

The panel's first report raised questions about the idea of injecting more than 1-billion gallons of freshwater a day into 333 wells and holding it 1,000 feet underground as a bubble in the brackish aquifer, to be pumped later back to the surface to feed the Everglades or thirsty Floridians.

The science panel warned that holding water in Florida's underground caverns for so long could lead to chemical interactions with the rocks, and that the pressure will fracture the rocks that separate drinking water from millions of gallons of municipal sewage being injected below the wells.

The panel has two more reports in the works that are slated for release this fall. One takes another look at the water-storage plan, while the other examines how to measure whether the project is actually succeeding.

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Lucy Morgan

From the Times state desk