Dance of the Reptiles (7 page)

Gov. Jeb Bush wants a special panel to examine the way in which Florida’s shorelines are being developed, with an
aim of better hurricane protection. It would be a fine idea if it weren’t 50 years too late. We’re sitting ducks, all of us.

Much of the lower eastern seaboard and Gulf Coast are in the same predicament, as evidenced by the astounding scenes of mass flight first in Louisiana, then in Texas—millions of people jamming the highways, trying to get away. What else is there to do when a hurricane comes? With no remaining natural barriers to shield us, the only intelligent option is to run like hell.

No matter how much death, destruction, and dislocation occur, nothing changes to make things safer. We can’t undo what’s already been done to the coastlines, but why keep repeating the same dangerous mistakes?

The cost of hurricane relief to taxpayers this year alone will exceed $100 billion, but there is no talk of wetlands policy reform among the so-called conservatives in Washington. Greed always trumps common sense and science. Waterfront property is the Holy Grail of the real-estate trade, and few politicians are courageous enough to argue for sane growth regulations.

In 1989, Hurricane Hugo destroyed scores of luxury homes on the barrier islands of South Carolina. Most were grandly rebuilt, an act of impudence subsidized by you and me. Eventually, those houses will be wrecked by another storm, and we’ll again pay for new ones. It’s quite a system.

Trent Lott, the Republican senator from Mississippi, lost a stilt cottage on the Gulf to Katrina. In one of his now-weekly visits to the region, President Bush predicted that Lott will have a “fantastic” new home on the same site. I’m sure that’s a big relief to the senator’s constituents, many of whom are sleeping in shelters these days.

Whenever a disaster strikes, there are two kinds of victims:
those who had the opportunity to be somewhere else and those who didn’t.

Years ago, I moved to the Keys in full command of my faculties, knowing that my house would get thumped every now and then by a hurricane, which it has. I’ve got no excuses and deserve no sympathy.

Save it for those who have no choice. Often they’re held in place by poverty or a hard-won job. You saw them by the thousands in the gut-wrenching footage from the Superdome and Gulfport and Biloxi.

Many who evacuated will never go back to where they lived before. Those who do might find themselves fleeing again someday, in advance of another terrible storm.

Unwilling to control the foolish way we exploit our coastlines, the government can’t do anything about hurricanes except tell us when to run.

October 9, 2005

How to Kill a Perfectly Good Florida River

The killing of the St. Lucie River is deplorable but hardly unique. Other Florida rivers are being destroyed, although the symptoms aren’t so arresting.

The St. Lucie is dying as a man-made slime trail, a huge vein of effluent streamed with blue-green algae. The remaining fish are increasingly sick and ulcerated, the birds have flown, and residents of neighboring counties are being warned to keep their children away from the water.

Unlike some of Florida’s rivers—poisoned slowly by mines and paper mills—the St. Lucie is dying very publicly and in a heavily populated region. Many thousands of people live on or near the waterway, and some are protesting loudly.

It’s uncomfortable for state authorities. Often a river can
be killed off without much fuss; only a few stout souls in mill towns dare to protest, and the enviros downstream don’t get much play in the local media.

But the St. Lucie is different. Palm Beach County TV stations have been avidly covering the story, sending up helicopters—helicopters!—to take video of the churning crud.

This is bad. This is ugly stuff.

The source is Lake Okeechobee, a humongous latrine for ranches, farms, groves, and, more recently, massive residential developments in central Florida. For decades the state has tolerated the dumping of cattle manure, pesticides, and fertilizers into the big lake. Tons of foul sediment were stirred up by last year’s hurricanes, and water is now being pumped at up to 26,000 gallons per second into the St. Lucie River.

Water managers blame the weather. Months of heavy rain have forced them to keep flushing Lake Okeechobee so it won’t overflow, they say. The runoff can’t be sent elsewhere because the high phosphorus levels exceed the limits imposed for the Everglades restoration project.

So where does all that bad water go? Down the Caloosahatchee River to the Gulf of Mexico, and down the St. Lucie to the Atlantic.

What the good people of Martin and St. Lucie counties see and smell on their river is the disastrous culmination of generations of lousy planning, worse management, and slimy politics. Florida has a squalid record of letting special interests exploit and contaminate our public waterways, and the state remains an unfailingly enthusiastic partner in such pollution. Georgia-Pacific, which empties up to 36 million gallons of crap every day into a creek near Palatka, now has a permit to pipe its waste directly to the St. Johns River. Meanwhile, International Paper in Pensacola has a green light to build an outfall pipe to wetlands along Perdido Bay.

The most outrageous case is in Taylor County, up in Florida’s Big Bend. There, the Buckeye paper mill, which manufactures fluff for disposable diapers, has annihilated virtually all life in the once teeming Fenholloway River. In a grievously belated attempt to restore the Fenholloway to a “fishable-swimmable” waterway, the state has brilliantly decided to let Buckeye pipe its toxins straight to the Gulf of Mexico, a swath of which has already been deadened by noxious dumping.

For these upcoming atrocities, you can thank pro-industry stooges at the federal Environmental Protection Agency and Florida’s assiduously gutless Department of Environmental Protection (the former chief, David Struhs, left for a job at International Paper). The rivers will go black before any Bush brother notices.

Rather than requiring big companies and governments to clean their waste, it’s much easier (and cheaper) to pipe it somewhere less noticeable. Somebody would have already suggested that remedy for the St. Lucie River were it feasible to build a sewer pipe from Lake Okeechobee to the sea. With property values along the St. Lucie in jeopardy and much of the river unsafe for human recreation, plenty of folks in Martin and St. Lucie counties are angry.

Officials of the South Florida Water Management District say that they’re at the mercy of the rains and of the timetable for Everglades restoration. On the drawing board is the C-44 reservoir, which supposedly will cleanse about 13 billion gallons of Lake Okeechobee poo before it reaches the St. Lucie. Unfortunately, the project isn’t due for completion until 2010, and many fear it will be too late. The Martin County commission has discussed suing the water district for wrecking the St. Lucie, and similar action is being considered by a group called the Rivers Coalition.

Meanwhile, the Stuart/Martin Chamber of Commerce has enlisted a big-time lawyer, Willie Gary, to join the river battle. Gary lives along the St. Lucie and has offered his counsel for free, which is not happy news for the state.

In what many residents perceive as a blunt threat, some water managers have suggested that litigation could result in the postponement of the C-44 reservoir construction. In other words: Shut up, be patient, and trust us.

It’s not easy.

The history of Florida waters is one of greedy abuse and neglect. Surely there must be a way to save the Everglades without killing the rivers that border it.

The ruination of Lake Okeechobee took 70 years, but the St. Lucie is deteriorating much faster. Completion of the filtering reservoir is a minimum of five years away, which is an awfully long time to wait if you’re a kid who wants to fish or go swimming.

An awfully long time to sit by and watch a river die.

June 11, 2006

No Reason to Rejoice over Manatee Ruling

Let the celebration begin.

Manatees, those lovable, bewhiskered icons of Florida waterways, are officially no longer endangered!

The news is all the more amazing because the state’s own biologists fear “a significant decline” in the manatee population due to increased threats from boats, red tide, and habitat loss.

That doesn’t sound like much of a reason to break out the champagne, but it’s only because we don’t understand the advanced scientific logic used by state regulators: Reducing the number of manatees in the wild simply means there will be fewer of them to die later.

That’s obviously what members of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission had in mind last week when they voted unanimously to downgrade the pokey sea cow to the status of “threatened.”

Cheering estimates that the burly aquatic mammals now number about 3,000, commission chairman Rodney Barreto said, “I believe the manatee has recovered. We should be rejoicing.”

So far, the only ones rejoicing over the panel’s decision are waterfront developers, marina builders, and representatives of the marine industry, who for five years have been waging an expensive political campaign to get the manatee “downlisted.”

They were miffed by strict rules imposed in some places while manatees were on the state’s endangered list. Speed zones were established that inconvenienced fishermen and weekend boaters, while restrictions were imposed on permits for new docks and marinas in certain areas.

As adorable as they might be, the sea cows had become a nuisance. They were getting in the way of big plans by people with big bucks. The more slips that you can cram into a marina, the fatter your profit margins. And the larger the marina is, the more boats will be sold to fill it.

Everybody makes out dandy except for the nearsighted manatees, which tend to gather and breed in the same quiet waters along which developers like to build their projects.

So, heavyweight lobbyists such as Wade Hopping were hired to promote the notion that manatees are doing just great. Last week the seven FWCC commissioners, all appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush, agreed.

A nonscientist looking at the mortality data might wonder why they’re so upbeat. Last year, 396 manatees—more than 10 percent of the estimated population—died. Of those, only
81 fatalities were classified as natural. This year, manatees are perishing at a record pace. As of May 31, there were 195 known deaths in Florida.

Those sorts of statistics don’t exactly make you want to dance a jig with Rodney Barreto. Nor does the final report of the state Biological Review Panel, which says there’s a better than even chance that the manatee population will shrink by 20 percent over the next 30 years. But sunny optimism rules at the wildlife commission, which prefers to trumpet a 100 percent increase in the annual aerial manatee census over the last 20 years.

Yet if the protection program is working so well, why scrap it? Isn’t it insane to eliminate the very rules that resulted in such impressive results?

It is if you want the manatee population to continue growing—but that’s plainly not the goal of coastal developers, the recreational marine industry, or state wildlife managers.

By their count, we’ve got enough sea cows. What we need more of is boats, docks, ramps, marinas, and condos. To the softhearted, the lobbyists might say: What better way to reduce the number of manatee deaths than to start reducing the number of manatees? Scratching the species off the endangered list was the first step, but no restrictions on building or boating can be lifted until the state comes up with a management plan.

Meanwhile, the manatee remains on the federal endangered species list, although the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is under pressure from members of Congress who are shilling for the same special interests that prevailed in Florida.

At last week’s meeting in which the manatee’s rebound was heralded, state wildlife officials elevated the gopher tortoise to the list of threatened species. They did not, however, suspend the policy of permitting developers to bury
the animals alive in exchange for paying into a conservation fund.

More than 74,000 gopher tortoises have been “entombed” with state approval, which might explain why the species is in trouble. Commissioners promised to find a less cruel way to deal with the critters one of these days.

Presumably, we can look forward to another round of rejoicing.

April 1, 2007

If You Like Polluted Rivers, You’ll Love This

Say goodbye to the days when you dipped a toe in a lake to see if it was warm enough for a swim. Soon that toe will be the only part of your anatomy that you’ll dare immerse in certain waters, and only then if you’re not especially worried about arsenic, cyanide, or fecal bacteria.

Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection is steaming ahead with plans to reclassify state waterways for the benefit of corporate and agricultural polluters.

Rather than requiring paper mills, phosphate mines, and ranches to clean up their effluent, the DEP has devised a ranking system that could forever surrender some of the most damaged rivers, lakes, and canals to those who are using them as a sewer.

Florida waterways now fall into one of five classes, depending on cleanliness and safety. Class I is drinking water, followed by shellfish harvesting (Class II); recreational uses such as swimming, boating, and fishing (Class III); agricultural (Class IV); and industrial (Class V), which currently is not used.

It’s noteworthy that the state has more rigorous aquatic
health standards for oysters than for humans, a policy that would be creatively expanded under the DEP’s new proposal.

Under the plan, Class III recreational waters would be divided into three “Human Use” categories with escalating degrees of risk. Waterways classified as HU-3 theoretically would be safe for all fishing and swimming activities. Full-body contact with the water would not be considered dangerous, so you could dunk all your extremities, not just a toe. However, an outing to a river rated HU-4 would be more adventurous. Fishing would be permitted, but the state would recommend only “limited human contact.”