FL - Okeechobee Water Quality Continues To Deteriorate

[hatrack]

Despite early successes in reviving the Everglades, the vast ecosystem’s liquid heart — Lake Okeechobee — continues to waste away, a new federal report suggests.

Water managers have largely failed to improve the lake’s water quality, leaving behind a mess that threatens the health of a national wildlife refuge and the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers’ estuaries, according to the report. “The lake’s woes have been with us for a while and, if history is a guide, they are not going away anytime soon,” wrote Miami lawyer John Barkett, who was appointed in 2003 by a federal judge to oversee Everglades restoration efforts.

Two reservoir projects led by the South Florida Water Management District are under construction on both rivers. The nearly 70 billion gallons of storage capacity is scheduled to be ready by 2010, but that might not be soon enough, Barkett argues. “If the flora and fauna of the lake could talk, they would be shouting: ‘No more delays! Please stop the phosphorus,’ ” he wrote in the 108-page report, which alternates freely between technical and colloquial language.

The report is an outgrowth of a 1992 settlement between the state and the federal government, which had sued to prompt the state to follow its own clean water standards. Under the resulting consent order, the state faces a Dec. 31 deadline to reduce the concentration of Everglades-bound phosphorus to an extremely low 10 parts per billion.

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http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2006/jul/09/lake_os_water_quality_not_improving/?local_news