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Does Florida's flood lurk behind this wall?

The earthen berm that protects cities from Lake Okeechobee “bears a striking resemblance to Swiss cheese,” three engineering experts say. So, what if the big storm comes?

By TAMARA LUSH
Published June 17, 2006

BELLE GLADE — Teresa Miller doesn’t have a job, a phone or a car. She also doesn’t have a hurricane evacuation plan, and because her trailer is less than 2 miles from Lake Okeechobee, she’s scared.

Miller, 41, has heard about the cracks in the dike that holds the water back from the land. She wonders how much Hurricane Wilma eroded the earth berm around the lake last year. And she worries that if there is a fierce enough storm, the dike could give way and the lake’s entire southeast shore could become another New Orleans — flooded and destroyed.

“There’s going to be a lot of deaths if that thing breaks,” Miller said.

As the 2006 hurricane season begins, officials in a dozen counties are worried about the same thing.

One reason for the anxiety: a recent report by three engineering experts said that the dike “bears a striking resemblance to Swiss cheese” and that it poses a “grave and imminent danger” to the 44,000 residents and the billion-dollar South Florida agriculture industry near the lake. The Army Corps of Engineers — the same agency that built the faulty New Orleans levees — needs to take action immediately, the report said.

“The kind of comprehensive repairs needed for the Herbert Hoover Dike could conceivably exceed the corps’ entire annual budget for dam safety improvements nationwide, and other structures posing even greater safety risks are standing in line ahead of it,” the report, commissioned by the South Florida Water Management District, reads.

“With a predicted 50/50 chance of failing within the next four years, we are not optimistic that Herbert Hoover Dike can wait its turn to the front.”

After reading the report, both Gov. Jeb Bush and the water management district asked the federal government to “take immediate action to avert a potential disaster.”

But the Army Corps of Engineers says that the report is an overreaction to a problem that is on its way to being fixed and that the key to safety is lake levels, not whether the dike is breached.

“People shouldn’t think in terms of Hurricane Katrina when they think of what the conditions might be on the outside of the lake if there is a breach in the dike,” said Nanciann Regalado, spokeswoman for the Army Corps of Engineers. “Everybody is thinking, 'Wow, a hurricane may cause a breach in the dike,’ but the issue is a little more complicated than it’s coming across.”

On Sept. 16, 1928, a Category 5 hurricane made landfall in Palm Beach County. Without slowing, it barrelled over the towns of Pahokee, Belle Glade and South Bay. One resident described it this way:

“This storm was a raging inferno of roaring, twisting waters, shrieking, demonic winds and lashing rains of darkness, black absolute.”

Water was pushed out of the lake and washed over the 5-foot-high earth berm intended to protect the communities. Floodwaters nearly 20 feet high extended for 75 miles around the south end of the lake. Some 2,000 people died; the majority were migrant workers and black, Caribbean immigrants. Many were buried in mass graves.

A few weeks after the storm, when the waters finally receded, President Herbert Hoover visited the area. An engineer, Hoover insisted that a larger dike be built so that the lake would never cause such a catastrophe again. Five feet of dirt clearly wasn’t enough to stop a huge hurricane.

Construction began in 1932. Over the years, engineers raised the dike to 35 feet ­— its current level. It would also become one of the single most important things ever to happen to South Florida: The dike allowed for controlled drainage, which led to irrigation of the Everglades and an explosion in agriculture. It also allowed South Florida cities to tap into a clean water source.

The dike, 140 miles long and made up of soil and clay, has some permeability; it was never meant to be used as a dam. Army Corps spokeswoman Regalado says that there have always been “seepage issues” with the dike but that they have been watched closely. Some of that seepage caused the corps to begin work on repairing the dike in 2005.

Many longtime residents of the area aren’t too concerned whether the dike will give way — especially not now.

“The lake’s low,” shrugged 81-year-old James Weeks, a lifelong Pahokee resident who worked on the dike. “It would take a big hole in the dike to flood the town.”

Regalado explained that the water level in the lake is much more relevant to a dike breach than any windstorm or waves caused by a hurricane. When the lake level is low — in early June, it was about 12.5 feet above sea level — the lake can accommodate heavy rainfalls from the hurricane. Corps engineers can also release water from the lake, making the levels safer, but that process takes weeks.

The problem arises, she said, when the lake levels are higher, as they were last year: 18.5 feet after Hurricane Wilma. The 2004 hurricane season and a wet spring in 2005 led to high lake levels. Parts of the dike did erode due to seepage from the high water levels, but Regalado said the erosion isn’t anything to worry about. At no point did the water level slosh over the dike.

“We were not overly concerned about that erosion event, because of the location and depth,” she said, adding that the corps inspects the dike weekly if the levels are over 15.5 feet. “If it had been as extreme as people were thinking, we would have been out with sandbags just like that.”

But as the National Hurricane Center points out on its Web page memorial of the 1928 killer storm: “While today’s Hoover Dike with a grade elevation approaching 30 feet is reassuring, it has not yet been tested with a direct hit by a category 4 or 5 hurricane.”

On a recent day, 150 emergency planners from around South Florida met at the West Palm Beach Convention Center to talk about evacuation plans for the people who live near Lake Okeechobee.

The officials broke up into workgroups, talked about different scenarios and heard speeches from more officials. They found out that FEMA has earmarked $3.2-million toward Okeechobee evacuation efforts.

Sixty miles away in Belle Glade, Teresa Miller and her friend, 37-year-old Lorie Knight, stopped by the public library to look at job listings on the Internet. Taking a break, they wandered into the adjacent town museum, and stared at the grim, sepia-toned photos of the 1928 hurricane.

If the past is any measure, Miller and Knight are like those tired-looking souls in the photos: Belle Glade’s most vulnerable residents. Knight’s trailer was destroyed during Hurricane Wilma; Miller’s was damaged. Both women are living in the damaged, moldy trailer, and both can barely afford food, much less a hurricane kit.

“We’re hoping our families help us out if there’s a hurricane,” said Miller. “I don’t want to stick around.”
Belle Glade is one of the poorest cities in South Florida, if not in the entire state. It was where Edward R. Murrow filmed his documentary Harvest of Shame in 1960, about the abysmal living conditions of migrant workers.

Things have gotten only marginally better in the 46 years since then: 30 percent of families in Belle Glade live below the poverty level, 40 percent speak a language other than English at home and 26 percent of the population is disabled.

The nearby towns of Pahokee and South Bay share similar demographics. Eight months after Hurricane Wilma, all three communities still have storm debris and garbage lining the streets. Blue roofs are as common as regular roofs, and people are forced to live in damaged trailers because they have nowhere else to go. Of the 44,000 people who live in the Glades area, a full one-quarter do not have transportation.

Rep. Mark Foley says that at this point in the hurricane season, all officials can hope for is a solid evacuation plan if the worst happens.

“That’s something we can control,” he said. In the meantime, he said, more analysis is needed.

“One of the things I’d like to do is get a third party to review both reports,” Foley said. “The Army Corps says everything is fine, the consultant says there is imminent danger. Common sense would tell me that we’ve been through three hurricanes and the dike has sustained.”

Foley said that he has seen no evidence that anyone in the corps or local government ignored the problem over the years. Like others, he was heartened by the $300-million in dike repairs planned by the corps. The work had been going smoothly until the beginning of June, when it was discovered that the contractor accidentally allowed unwanted sand into the mix.

Work on the dike has been halted, and it is not expected to resume for months.

Times researchers Carolyn Edds and Angie Holan contributed to this report.

[Last modified June 17, 2006, 20:32:30]