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Take a dip in the second-largest lake in the United States? Not unless you can scramble over dirt and concrete walls and survive the pesticides. Will we ever be able to undo 30 years of man's meddling?
By JULIE HAUSERMAN, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published May 31, 2000
CLEWISTON -- In the vast, green-fringed fields of Florida's sugar cane country, only newcomers seem surprised by the Lake Okeechobee dike.
I know I was. Fifteen years ago, a fresh-faced Yankee, I saw the huge blue blob on the Florida map and wanted to go there. Walk along the shores of America's second-largest lake (only Lake Michigan is bigger.) Maybe take a swim.
After an hour's drive from the coast into Florida's middle, I dead-ended at a giant wall of earth and grass. It looked like the side of a landfill.
But as many travelers discovered before and since, I had indeed reached Lake Okeechobee's shore, or at least what passes for it these days. A steep, sodded mound, protected from the waves by piles of trucked-in rocks too treacherous to climb.
The Herbert Hoover Dike, as wide as a football field and as tall as a three-story building, stretches a whopping 140 miles around Okeechobee. It's a fat, earthen snake, with towering mechanical locks to let boats through and enormous gates to hold water in and let it out. It took 30 years to mow down the lakeside forests, dredge the marshes, and erect the mammoth dike. By the mid-1960s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was done.
"It's weird," says Nancy Marsh, a grandmother from Lake Worth who paused on a cross-state drive to climb the dike near the town of South Bay. "You can't imagine them putting a big dike around those Great Lakes up north."
You can't.
But you practically expect it in Florida. The wall around Lake Okeechobee is just one part of a massive manipulation: People came to this state because it was beautiful and, once they got here, promptly began hauling in equipment to turn it into something else. White sand beaches became condo canyons. Meandering rivers became unbending canals. The Everglades became ditched farmland.
And Lake Okeechobee became an artificial reservoir. Years later, we are realizing it wasn't such a good idea after all.
There are no longer any true "lakeside towns" around Okeechobee. Like an interstate slicing a neighborhood in two, the dike has cut them off from the 730-square-mile lake for good.
In Pahokee, a Burger King backs up to what would be a waterfront vista. Except it's just a giant, mowed berm looming above the restaurant's roof. Even the rich people in Clewiston, home to U.S. Sugar Corp., see only the giant dike when they look through the windows of their manicured mansions.
"It's what we planners would call a "visual access problem,' " Palm Beach County planner Vicki Silver says dryly. "I've always thought it had the potential for marketing as "Florida's Lost Sea.' "
The Corps' giant public works project has an eerie military order to it: ramrod-straight canals, buzz-cut levees, square irrigated fields with razor-sharp corners. But the communities that the flood control project is designed to protect look haphazard: rusty old school buses carry migrant workers through sugar cane and vegetable fields. Rundown shacks sit crumpled along the highway. And trucks rumble endlessly around the lake, taking the region's fertile fruits somewhere else.
Today, mowing and groundskeeping on the dike and the parks along it cost taxpayers $1.5-million every year. It costs another $9-million a year to operate the pumps and gates and other gizmos that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers needs to keep this once-self-sufficient lake running in an artificial world.
"This monster had to be controlled by bigger levees and by bigger canals," trumpets a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers propaganda film from the 1950s called Waters of Destiny (see related story, this page). "We've got to control the water and make it do our bidding."
Now, Corps engineers say the aging dike is leaking, and could breach in high water. The engineers estimate that fixing the first 22 miles will cost $64-million -- a little more than $3-million a mile. That's on top of a staggeringly ambitious $8-billion -- that's billion with a "B" -- plan to replumb Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades.
The government has built skinny, steep roads with guard rails leading to the top of the dike. In some places, tax dollars have paid for flat parks on the inside of the dike, down where the lake is. You can't just drive around up there: most of the road is fenced off. Bicyclers hold an annual ring-around-the-lake ride.
Locals stand on overturned bait buckets and hang their arms over over tall chain-link fences to fish -- not in the lake, but in the artificial canals that stretch out like spider legs outside the dike. The fishermen cluster beneath the mammoth, industrial-looking concrete locks, standing on cement piers without a single shade tree.
I want to yell: "Hey! There's a lake right over there!"
After a rain storm blew over the lake one sweltering evening in Clewiston, I saw a rainbow -- but I had to peer through barbed wire and a chain-link fence to see it.
There was plenty to be scared about. Two hurricanes, one in 1926 and one in 1928, turned Lake Okeechobee deadly. The 1928 storm killed about 2,000 people when the big lake broke through an old, five-foot farm dike and flooded towns and farm fields -- a natural disaster rivaled only by the Galveston Hurricane and the Johnstown Flood.
The wind howled at 160 miles per hour. Nobody in that remote part of Florida had adequate warning. Many of those killed were farm workers who didn't know how to swim. It took six weeks to collect the bodies. Anguished survivors and rescue workers piled up the dead people, burned the bodies, and buried many of them in a mass grave near the lake. For a long time afterward, farmers continued to find skeletons in their fields.
"We have not forgotten the hurricanes of the 1920s," says Clarence Anthony, the mayor of South Bay, a tiny, poor town of farm workers on the lake's southern shore that brags about its newest employer, a prison.
Several years ago, a South Florida planner came up with a scheme to tear down part of the dike, a proposal he later called "radical common sense."
The planner, Dan Williams of the University of Miami, was hired by the government to find a way to revitalize Belle Glade, an impoverished lakeside farming community.
A huge vegetable farming operation owned by U.S. Sugar Corp. shut down in 1994, leaving hundreds jobless. At the town limits, a sign greets visitors: "Belle Glade: Her Soil is Her Fortune."
Williams looked at the map, saw the lake, and asked the obvious question: Why is this community cut off from the water?
His idea: Tear down the dike to reconnect the town and the lake. Use the dirt to build up a new, higher Belle Glade with lakefront homes and water-based businesses. Allow the lake waters to once again run over the fields and build up the soil during the rainy season. Convert the town to a center for organic farming, a fast-growing market.
"Basically, I was run out of town on a rail," said Williams, who -- for unrelated reasons -- later moved to Seattle.
Belle Glade Mayor Harma Miller, who grew up in a migrant farming family, considered the plan an affront.
"This is a real place," she said. "There are extreme environmentalists who don't want any town here."
Williams believes the dike is really there to benefit the sugar industry south of the lake, which relies on Lake Okeechobee to irrigate cane fields that stretch off to the horizon, a green sea propped up by pesticides, irrigation canals, farm subsidies and cheap labor.
"Tell me: Why were there no dikes put up so that terrible Biscayne Bay wouldn't flood downtown Miami anymore? Because it was valuable waterfront property, and people knew it," Williams said. "There's really no threat now, with modern warnings, that the lake will rise up and kill people. And you're losing billions in ecotourism dollars. It's 140 miles of coastline, gone."
The Army engineers were not the first mound builders around Lake Okeechobee. On the lake's southwestern shore, near Fisheating Creek, archaeologists unearthed a complex of circular mounds built 2,000 years ago by Indians, possibly the Calusa tribe. Some of the circles were house pads, some were ceremonial. Others, the late South Florida archaeologist William H. Sears argued in a 1982 book, were round farm ditches to irrigate and drain crops of maize.
The mound builders left spectacular artifacts that symbolize ancient life around Lake Okeechobee: carved wooden birds, panthers and owls. Near Belle Glade, another mound excavated by the Smithsonian Institution in 1933 yielded ceremonial talismans: four-foot-high totem poles, hair pins carved from deer bones, daggers made from an alligator's jaw, and a bowl made from a human skull.
Today's mound builders, the Army Corps, operate out of an art deco building that sits next to a Clewiston graveyard in the shadow of the Lake Okeechobee dike.
Pete Milam, a towering, mustachioed Marlboro man who started out as a biologist, oversees the massive plumbing system that the Corps created here.
"It is sad that you do not have a lot of public out there" on the lakeshore, he admits, after some prompting. "We want to get people out there, driving across the state, we want to get them off the road and let them drive on the crest of the dike. Here we've got the largest lake in Florida -- the second-largest lake in the United States -- and you cannot see it."
Actually, it's even worse than that.
Manipulating the shallow lake -- dredging up the marshy edges and replacing them with sterile rock; changing the water level to please farmers and thirsty cities; and polluting it with fertilizers, cow manure, and pesticides -- has made it deathly ill.
"It's very bad. There's no two ways about it," says Al Steinman, a South Florida Water Management District ecologist. "The dike created an artificial system and allowed us to create a water-supply reservoir instead of a natural lake."
At most of the lakeside parks, there are bulletin boards, covered by glass. Neon orange placards are posted there: "TREATMENT NOTICE: AQUATIC PLANT TREATMENTS ARE PLANNED IN THE FOLLOWING AREAS -- SEE MAP. USE OF REWARD/WEEDAR/RODEO."
Pesticides. The Corps and the state have to spray pesticides straight onto the weed-covered water, all the time, to keep exotic weeds from taking over.
The government uses poison, too, to kill Australian melaleuca trees that the Corps planted on artificial islands just inside the dike. Government workers spray pesticides from helicopters and hack into the trees to poison the flesh inside. The melaleucas are botanical invaders, muscling out native plants and gobbling up wetlands. So the Corps kills the trees it planted, then clears the dead trunks away.
"NOTICE: MELALEUCA CONTROL PROJECT IN MARSH AREAS OF THE LAKE. BOATERS WATCH FOR STUMPS," another lakeside notice says.
One day, while Florida Gov. Jeb Bush sat in front of the cameras at Everglades National Park signing a law to provide $2-billion to help replumb the Everglades, Pete Milam was in the Corps' Clewiston office, presiding over a controversial hydrological maneuver.
He was releasing water out of the lake to the sea.
When the lake gets high, the last remaining Lake Okeechobee marshes drown, hurting birds and fish. The Corps releases water down two canals: the St. Lucie to the east, and the Caloosahatchee to the west. By building a system that's dependent on pumps and engineers instead of nature, the government has dug itself into a deep political hole.
The town of Okeechobee, which depends on bass fishing to help its economy, threatened to sue the Corps for drowning the marshes. Martin County, on the east coast, threatened to sue after lake water was blamed for actually eating the flesh off fish in a local estuary. Lee County, on the west coast, sued to stop the Corps from sending lake water its way, but lost in court.
To stop the wrangling over the lake's level, the Corps plans yet another giant, unproven engineering fix. It wants to build huge reservoirs and punch 300 wells deep into the stony aquifer around Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades. When the lake water swells, the Corps would pump water into the reservoirs and then down into the aquifer, a shadowy labyrinth that scientists barely understand. During drought, engineers would pump the water back out. No one has ever tried to use the so-called "aquifer storage and recovery" wells on such a large scale.
"I believe the lake's going to be better off," said Stu Appelbaum, who heads the Corps' Everglades restoration effort. "We're still manipulating it, but we're manipulating it in a way that mimics what nature did before we impacted it."
Before she died at the age of 108, author Marjory Stoneman Douglas offered a theory about the Corps of Engineers' endless dredging, diking and filling in South Florida:
"Their mommies," she suggested in a voice like Julia Child's, "mustn't have let them play with mud pies!"
"Wasn't that old lake a fascinating place'
"Welcome to Gloriously Natural Glades County!" a roadside billboard shouts.
A few miles down the highway, at the Belle Glade library, I find a 1964 book, Cracker History of Okeechobee, by Lawrence Will, a local historian who survived the 1928 hurricane.
"Although the shores were, for the most part, black muck, low and flat, there were some sandy beaches too," he wrote. "Under leafy branches covered over with a solid blanket of white blossomed vines which made twilight at midday, you might walk for miles and scarcely glimpse the sky."
"The lakeshore's one-time natural beauty is gone, and man, wasn't that old lake a fascinating place."
I pull into one of the little parks inside the dike, my rental car snaking up the dike road and down the other side. Frankly, it's depressing here, even though the lake stretches out, water so big you can't see the other side. The wildness is neutered. Mowed. Edged.
I am thinking about the lost custard-apple forests, about the moon vines so thick they block out the sun. There's a boat ramp here, really just a road that dips into the lake.
A shiny red Chevrolet pulls up with Broward County plates and stops just short of the water. A man and his young son get out.
"There it is!" he tells the boy. They are driving across Florida. They stand there for a minute, by the car's front bumper. The boy picks up some gravel from the boat ramp and tosses it into Lake Okeechobee. There's nowhere to walk, or even wade, really.
They lean against the Chevy's warm hood.
"Well," the Broward County dad says. "You ready to go?"
They've been at Lake Okeechobee's shore for less than five minutes.
"Yeah," the boy says. He climbs in the front seat, and with a roar, they drive off toward somewhere else.
In the 1950s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers produced a propaganda film to build support for the Central and South Florida Flood control project. Called Waters of Destiny, it has the same urgent tone as war propaganda films and even Reefer Madness, a famous 1950s anti-drug film.
Waters of Destiny features endless photos of dredges and bulldozers "taming" nature around Lake Okeechobee and the Florida Everglades.
"It's a cult classic," quips Stu Appelbaum, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers official in charge of Everglades restoration today.
It opens with a shot of tourists frolicking on a South Florida beach:
"Beautiful, carefree, the land that nature always smiled upon -- or so it seemed."
(Ominous, dramatic music rises, storm clouds form.)
"Nature was frowning."
(Film shows Florida's cycle of rain, drought, and wildfires.)
"Once lush farmland, now reduced to dry dust by the crazed antics of the elements.
Central and South Florida just laid there, helplessly waiting to be soaked and dried and burned out again.
"Something had to be done, and something was.
"The going was tough, and many a drill point was dulled in attempts to burl the way for dynamite, foot by foot, mile by mile, the work went on: drilling, blasting, digging, bite by bite ... slowly, persistently, gouging the bottom to build up the top."
(Photos of alligators and snakes, slithering away from the dredges.)
"You had to watch your step. Progress usually finds anger along its path."
(Patriotic music rises.)
"We've got to control the water and make it do our bidding.
"Water that once ran wild. Water that ruined the rich terrain. Water that took lives and land and put disaster in the headlines and death upon the soils. Now, it just waits there -- calm, peaceful, ready to do the bidding of man and his machines.
"Oh, there are still heavy rains. Where the project's been completed, the dams will control them and the spillways release them and the canals take them on, sending them to the appointed areas. They lie there, waiting.
"So they wait -- the waters, there in the great natural reservoir of Lake Okeechobee. They wait for the warnings of drought. Now, they come out to spread life on the dried-up soils. Life brought unto man.
"No longer do the waters saturate and destroy the riches of the land.
"Much has been done. Central and Southern Florida is no longer nature's fool -- the stooge for the impractical jokes of the elements.
"In fact, it's just really begun. ... The great valley of the upper St. Johns is still somewhat defenseless.
"Was it worth it? Just look around you: What do you see? You see cattle country!"
(Peppy music rises, film shows scenes of a rodeo.)
"Look at it: Once upon a time, this land may have been under water."
(Film shows farmworkers in the fields.)
"$50-million in crop damage has been saved. Fifty million dollars. Think how much more will be saved, how many more hundreds of millions of dollars in the endless future before us?
"More tourists have come. Cities have grown. Sport has been better than ever. Families are safer than ever.
"For every dollar being spent, four dollars are coming back. As any business man knows, you can't do much better than that!
"Flood control must proceed as fast as humanly possible so that ... everyone, everywhere, can share in the rich results of man's mastery of the elements. "
(Patriotic music rises,)
"Then it shall be that the water -- once the fierce, uncompromising enemy of this long, wild, low-lying land, will become its greatest ally.