[South Florida Water Management District]
Cattails have supplanted saw grass on 100,000 acres of the Everglades, fed by phosphorus from the sugar industry, vegetable farms and suburbs.

By CRAIG PITTMAN, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published December 1, 2002

When Marjory Stoneman Douglas dubbed the Everglades "the River of Grass" in 1947, she was referring to the native saw grass. Back then it covered millions of acres, providing a home for wading birds and other wildlife.

But these days, the dominant plant across 100,000 acres of the Everglades is the cattail. It's choking the life out of parts of the state's most famous and precious swamp, blocking wading birds and altering the flow of water. Scientists estimate it is spreading at the rate of 2 to 9 acres a day.

Cattails took over because of phosphorus, a pollutant that for decades has flowed into the Everglades from sugar and vegetable farms and the sprawling suburbs of South Florida.

A year ago, state regulators vowed to cut the amount of phosphorus to a fraction of its current level, a tough stance that was cheered by environmental activists.

But at a recent meeting of the South Florida Water Management District board, an attorney for the state Department of Environmental Protection outlined ways to temper that strict limit.

DEP officials say they were merely outlining options should the attempt to cut back the pollution become too costly for the taxpayers or run into other difficulties.

"If the technology is just not there to reach that level, or there are economic or biological constraints, then under federal law we have the ability to provide some relief," said Ernie Barnett, DEP's ecosystem restoration director.

But environmental groups fear the state, under pressure from the influential sugar industry, won't cut back phosphorus as much as originally planned to halt the cattails' march across the Everglades.

Audubon of Florida senior vice president Charles Lee called the spreading cattails "a malignancy" and said finagling with the phosphorus limit means "you're basically saying you would be happy if the tumor grows a little more slowly."

U.S. Sugar vice president Robert Coker said sugar executives were "a little pleased" with the options outlined for softening the tough limit.

If the state sets too stringent a standard, he said, sugar companies might take the issue to court. "We're hopeful we don't have to do that, but I'll tell you this industry does have a history of defending itself," Coker said.

Phosphorus, a common component of fertilizer, is essential for plant growth. One of the things that in the past made the 4-million-acre Everglades unusual is that its native plants thrived on an unusually low level of phosphorus.

Over the past 50 years, while humans were draining and destroying half the Everglades, they also started pumping in a lot of extra phosphorus.

Some of the phosphorus comes from fertilizer-laden runoff pouring in from suburban developments at the edge of the Everglades and from vegetable farms south of Lake Okeechobee. But by far the largest amount is from the water pumped off the network of sugar farms south of the lake.

At its height, the amount of phosphorus pouring into the Everglades sometimes topped 300 parts per billion -- 30 times the maximum it can handle, state and federal scientists say. So DEP Secretary David Struhs announced last December that his agency would recommend lowering the limit to 10 parts per billion.

The seven-member Environmental Regulatory Commission must approve the restriction. The commission has been holding hearings, with the next round scheduled for this week. A final vote is expected in March.

Sugar industry researchers have been lobbying the commission for a higher limit. One group wants 30 parts per billion, while another says 15.6 parts per billion would be safe enough. But DEP officials are sticking to their guns.

"We think the science and the data show that if you get above 10 parts per billion, you will have a change in the native flora and fauna," Barnett said.

It has taken the state years to reach that conclusion. In 1988, the federal government sued Florida to force state officials to clean up the pollution. A 1991 settlement called for the phosphorus to be reduced to 10 parts per billion by this year.

Then, in 1994, state lawmakers passed the Everglades Forever Act, which pushed the deadline to Dec. 31, 2006. The law did not set a specific phosphorus level but just called for setting a limit by 2003.

The law also required sugar farmers to reduce the phosphorus running off their land by 25 percent. Over the past six years, sugar companies have gone well beyond what the law requires, cutting back their phosphorus levels to 64 parts per billion.

In fact, Coker said, the bigger problem may not be the sugar farmers but communities such as Wellington and Weston that have been built on the edge of the Everglades and continue to dump high levels of phosphorus unabated.

Meanwhile, the South Florida Water Management District launched a $763-million project to build the world's largest artificial marshes, to filter out the phosphorus before it can reach the Everglades. Combined with the sugar farmers' efforts, the marshes have cut the phosphorus level in the northern Everglades to the low 20s.

But state officials fear that getting to 10 parts per billion by 2006 will require drastic measures, perhaps even expensive chemical treatments that double the cost to the taxpayers and produce environmentally damaging byproducts.

"I don't believe chemical treatment is ever going to be viable," said Trudi Williams, chairwoman of the South Florida Water Management District, which will be in charge of cleaning up the water to the new standard. "Unfortunately, there's not a magic wand we can wave and all of a sudden the phosphorus is removed."

-- Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

Cattails at a glance

-- Cattails are aquatic or marsh herbs with creeping rootstocks, long, narrow leaves and tiny flowers crowded in terminal spikes. They occur in temperate and tropical regions.

-- The common cattail can grow up to 9 feet in height. One species found south of Delaware will sometimes grow to as much as 12 feet.

-- The cattail's starchy rootstock can be used for food.

-- Sources: Encyclopedia.com, enature.com

Back to State news

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright

Special Links

Lucy Morgan

From the Times state desk