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Toxic Algae and Fertilizer Runoff
For months during 2016, plumes of toxic algae turned South Florida’s emerald waters the color of coffee and smothered its inlets under a fetid blanket of guacamole-green goop that killed off fish, suffocated oyster beds and triggered a ferocious outcry from coastal residents.
From NBC’s “Today Show” to The Daily Telegraph of London, news outlets chronicled the closing of beaches, the declaration of a state of emergency and the desperate, heart-breaking efforts of people using garden hoses to save manatees, affectionately known as sea cows, caked in toxic slime and struggling to breathe.
Lake Okeechobee’s fertilizer-infused water turns the ocean the color of coffee causing ecological and economic calamity for South Florida’s Treasure Coast.
Lake Okeechobee’s fertilizer-infused water turns the ocean the color of coffee causing ecological and economic calamity for South Florida’s Treasure Coast.
But the reports didn’t explain the most tragic part of the story – that this calamity is man-made. It’s the culmination of 135 years of engineering missteps, hubris and a determination to turn Everglades sawgrass into cash crops. Despite talk of spending $10.5 billion over the next two decades to fix the problem, a cloud of political uncertainty leaves it unclear when, how – or even if – the harmful algae blooms will be stopped.
Environmental degradation is only part of the price the public pays so private companies can turn sugar into money. These tropical wetlands have been drained and maintained for decades at great expense for the benefit of Florida’s sugar cane industry, which is dominated by two politically connected companies. Billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on a regional flood control system that keeps the cane fields from flooding during periods of heavy rain and irrigated during droughts.
Adding to the public cost, a national sugar program requires American consumers to pay twice the world price for sugar through a blend of import quotas, tariffs and loan guarantees. Congress has kept the program in place specifically for the sugar industry since 1934.
Critics of the U.S. sugar policy say the ubiquitous, addictive commodity can be imported at half the price and without environmental damage here. Supporters counter that America shouldn’t allow itself to become dependent on foreign sugar, which is cultivated cheaply throughout the Caribbean – and beyond.
Opponents from the left and right decry the sugar program with some of the harshest epithets in America’s political lexicon: corporate welfare, crony capitalism, pork barrel politics – the spoils of a political system rigged by campaign contributions and influence peddling. But supporters, too, come from both sides of the aisle, so well-oiled is the political machine that influences them.
Sugarcane cultivation, which is concentrated south of the lake, accounted for less than 10 percent of the lake’s phosphorus.
The cane fields sit on 450,000 acres of reclaimed wetlands just below Lake Okeechobee in south-central Florida. The area is home to about 40,000 people and an economy based on farming. By contrast, some 6 million people live in the coastal zone affected by the algae – a region fueled by a great diversity of commercial activity, but especially tourism.
The economic boon of the smaller community has become the bane of the larger one. In future decades, rising temperatures and shifting rain patterns likely will worsen the plague of toxic algae.
This battle is seen by some as a test of the integrity of America’s political system, of just how freely the tools of political influence – campaign contributions, lobbying fees and the blandishments and acts of ingratiation that often come with them – can be leveraged to put the full benefit of nature’s bounty in a few hands while spreading the costs, including pollution and despoliation, across the rest of society. Because only a fraction of the sugar cane fields is being sought to solve the algae problem, some see it as a test of whether special interests can use these perfectly legal tools of modern American democracy to run roughshod over the broader public interest.
At the hub of the dispute is Lake Okeechobee – one of the nation’s largest lakes, the wellspring of the Everglades and the freshwater heart of South Florida.
For 6,000 years, excess groundwater has spilled over the southern rim of the lake, nourishing the Everglades before draining into the Florida Bay. To make way for the cane fields, engineers raised and fortified the lake’s southern shore, funneling all that excess groundwater through an array of canals, levees and pumping stations into two rivers that then dump it into the sea along Florida’s east and west coasts.
This cleared the way for the cane fields, but choked off water to the rest of the Everglades. It also infected the two rivers and South Florida’s coastlines with toxic algae.
Even more fearsome – it created a ticking time bomb in the form of a seeping dike that, should the right storm come along, could lay waste to everything and everybody in its path.
Deadly Dike:
Last January, record rains fell across central Florida, threatening the fragile dike that lines Lake Okeechobee’s southern rim. If the dike had failed then, the lake’s torrent of unleashed water could have killed tens of thousands of people and washed out a vast swath of cropland. In 1928, the dike ruptured, killing at least 2,500 people – the second-deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history.
Today, because of Florida’s burgeoning population, the impact could be far worse.
So the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, with an eye on the rising lake, reduced the risk by opening sluice gates and sending billions of gallons of lake water a day cascading east and west through the network of canals and rivers into the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico.
Rehabilitation work continues at Herbert Hoover Dike, with the replacement of more than 30 water control structures around the lake, similar to the Culvert 11 site pictured above. Jacksonville District plans to continue work to replace these structures through 2018.
Rehabilitation work continues at Herbert Hoover Dike, with the replacement of more than 30 water control structures around the lake. Jacksonville District plans to continue work to replace these structures through 2018.
But along the Atlantic coast, the lake’s fertilizer-infused water spawned giant plumes of toxic algae, turning the ocean the color of coffee and coating the shore in slime. The fouling of the ocean was an ecological and economic calamity for South Florida’s Treasure Coast, coming as it did during the height of the winter tourist season.
The Corps, which manages the nation’s water resources, figured the costs to the coast paled in comparison to the potential loss of human life if the dike failed – a cataclysm that could be far deadlier than the 2005 failure of levees in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Adding to the concern, the 143-mile-long dike, named in the 1930s after former-president Herbert Hoover, had been built piecemeal over 135 years, beginning in the 19 century with sand, shells and muck. It leaks and is in constant need of inspection and repair.
The higher the level of the lake, the higher the risk of a failure. As the Corps sees it, the sea is its only safety valve when the lake becomes too full.
“We’re making choices between trying to protect the integrity of the dike – the safety of the people who live and work around the lake – or upsetting the balance of a delicate ecological system,” said Corps spokesman John Campbell.
Domino Effect:
The decision to release the lake water reignited a bitter political and legal battle pitting South Florida’s coastal residents, businesses and environmentalists against the state’s powerful sugar industry.
Coastal fishing guide Mike Connor said his business is off 50 percent this year because of the algae blooms. His losses “trickle up” through Florida’s tourism-driven coastal economy, he said.
Coastal fishing guide Mike Connor said his business is off 50 percent this year because of the algae blooms.
“We put people in the water, they have to stay in a hotel,” Connor explained. “They go to restaurants. They go to the movies at night. They rent a car here. They buy gas here.… If they’re not here in my boat fishing, they aren’t here.”
Farmers south of Lake Okeechobee make a similar argument. Their economy would be hurt if tens of thousands of acres of cropland were taken out of service to restore the natural flow of water south through the Everglades.
“It would be a domino effect,” said sugar cane grower Keith Wedgworth. “If you lose one of the sugar mills, the hardware store, the parts store, the lumber store, it would be a domino effect around the Glades.”
Wedgworth, a fourth-generation Everglades farmer, cultivates 8,000 acres of sugar cane and 1,000 acres of rice on reclaimed land south of the dike.
“We’re the small population, so it’s easy to blame us.”
Money Talks:
Connor, the fishing guide, said public officials in Tallahassee favor central Florida’s sparsely populated inland farming community at the expense of south Florida’s sprawling coastal metropolis because of the sugar industry’s out-sized political influence.
“Florida’s the sport fishing capital of the world… but our politicians from the governor on down aren’t treating it like the sport fishing capital,” Connor said. “They’re letting the water go to hell…. The Ag industry, the chief being sugar, has so much influence in Tallahassee and Washington. They’re at the top of the totem pole; we’re way down here.”
That point was underscored during a GOP presidential debate earlier this year when Texas Sen. Ted Cruz took a swipe at one of his rivals for the nomination, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a champion of the sugar industry.
“Sugar farmers farm under roughly 0.2 percent of the farmland in America, and yet they give 40 percent of the lobbying money,” Cruz asserted to Rubio, a beneficiary of the sugar industry’s political largesse.
Rubio is hardly the only politician to benefit from the sugar industry’s generosity. So far in the 2016 election cycle, Florida’s two largest sugar companies – Florida Crystals and U.S. Sugar – have given federal candidates almost $3 million in campaign contributions, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which compiles federal campaign finance data.
During that same two-year period, the two companies paid out more than $3.6 million to federal lobbyists and the Florida Sugar Cane League added another $2 million.
These and other sugar interests also dispense political money in Tallahassee. They use contributions and lobbyists to gain influence with lawmakers of both parties, the better to hedge against electoral uncertainty, especially at the federal level.
Tales of Influence:
Like most lobbying, sugar lobbying is conducted in the shadows as much as possible. But sometimes it finds its way into the spotlight.
Florida Crystals, which includes the Domino brand, is owned by a family that left behind its vast sugar holdings when it fled Cuba after Fidel Castro took power in 1959. The Fanjul family moved to Florida, bought reclaimed land here south of Lake Okeechobee and continued its sugar dynasty. Today, it owns 155,000 acres in what is known as the Everglades Agricultural Area and has powerful friends on both sides of the political aisle.
Pepe Fanjul (left), and Alfonso Fanjul (right), members of a family that owns vast sugar conglomerate Florida Crystals, exerts considerable political influence on both sides of the political aisle.
The Fanjul family gained some notoriety in 1998 when a commission set up to investigate then-President Bill Clinton’s relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky discovered and reported a vivid example of the family’s Oval Office reach.
The report, prepared by Kenneth Starr, disclosed that Alfonso “Alfy” Fanjul had kept Clinton on the phone for 22 minutes in 1996 while the president was trying to explain to Lewinsky that they needed to end their sexual relationship. Fanjul’s call came as Congress was considering a penny-a-pound tax on sugar companies to pay for cleaning up pollution in the Everglades. The Clinton administration withheld its support for the legislation, and it died in Congress.
Florida’s other giant sugar corporation, U.S. Sugar, has its own awkward lobbying tale, this one involving Republican officeholders in Tallahassee. The company built a hunting lodge on land it leased from the King Ranch in Texas, a prized destination for hunters. Company executives hosted Florida Republican Gov. Rick Scott and GOP state lawmakers at the lodge on weekends. The fun came to an end in 2014 after the Tampa Bay Times disclosed the U.S. Sugar-financed junkets.
Another Fanjul brother, Pepe, has co-hosted fundraisers for Donald Trump, according to published reports.
During an Oct. 11 appearance in Panama City, Trump outlined his strategy for dealing with the Lake Okeechobee releases.
“It’s amazing,” he said. “You know, Lake Okeechobee, they’re always letting the water out. Do you ever notice we always have droughts? They’re always letting the water out. Keep it in! We won’t have any droughts.”
At a more recent campaign stop, Trump added a call for the dike to be fortified.
Sweet Deal for Sugar:
Flooding, algae and pollution aren’t the only items on the sugar industry’s lobbying agenda.
A top industry priority is protecting the national sugar program, a blend of import quotas, tariffs and loan guarantees that Congress has kept in place since 1934. The American Sugar Alliance, one of several sugar trade groups, says the program is “the cheapest major commodity program because sugar farmers do not receive subsidy checks.”
But opponents say it costs American consumers billions of dollars every year – and jobs.
“Last year, on average sugar cost nearly twice as much in the United States as in the rest of the world,” said Bryan Riley, a senior policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. “That means higher prices when you buy your Halloween candy. It also means that your Halloween treats may well have been produced in another country, since many candy producers have had to relocate to escape high U.S. sugar prices.”
A 2015 analysis by Mark J. Perry of the American Enterprise Institute found the sugar program costs consumers and businesses more than $3 billion annually. A 2013 study by Iowa State University found the sugar program costs consumers up to $3.5 billion a year – and up to 20,000 jobs.
Defenders of the program, such as Rubio, argue that it’s needed so the United States doesn’t become dependent on other nations for sugar. But many of those same defenders have become dependent on sugar interests for campaign money. Florida Crystals gave a Rubio political group $250,000 in December 2015. Two months later, U.S. Sugar gave it $100,000.
Messing with Mother Nature:
The roots of Florida’s toxic algae conflict lie in 19th century ambitions to transform vast swamps south of Lake Okeechobee, viewed as “worse than worthless,” into productive farmland. Remaking millions of acres, as explorer Buckingham Smith put it in 1848, would earn a settler “a high place in public favor, not only with his own generation, but with posterity. He will have created a State!”
To accomplish the feat, farm settlers and engineers set themselves to the task of redirecting the natural flow of an almost unimaginable volume of Florida’s ground water, which had been until then southerly through the Everglades to the peninsula’s tip and into the Florida Bay.
Initially, these early settlers fortified the southern shore of the lake with primitive muck levees that were easily overwhelmed by Florida’s rampaging storms. That led engineers to dig canals to carry excess water, when necessary, to the St Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers, which run east and west, respectively.
The St. Lucie drains into the Atlantic and the Caloosahatchee into the Gulf. There, the excess freshwater from the lake would be but a mere drop in the proverbial saltwater bucket.
Murky water from Lake Okeechobee discharges into the St. Lucie River.
Murky water from Lake Okeechobee discharges into the St. Lucie River.
But for 135 years, Mother Nature has confounded these engineers in what has become an epic chess match.
Faced with adverse unintended consequences of earlier moves, succeeding generations of engineers built higher and wider levees, more canals and even reservoirs in a vain effort to defy 6,000 years of natural order and keep the shallow, 730-square-mile lake in its bed during the kind of heavy rains and stiff winds Florida is famous for, the kind that can whip up an angry, powerful, southerly surge in the lake bed that, if it were to rupture the dike, would unleash the force and fury of a great tsunami plunging downhill through a naked basin of farm fields and small towns.
Mother Nature let it be known from the start that tampering with her wouldn’t be easy. Shortly after the first canal was put into service in 1881, water released from the lake flooded property along the Caloosahatchee River, drawing protests from land owners.
In 1926, a hurricane ruptured the dike, killing 300 people.
Two years later, another hurricane burst the dike, this time killing at least 2,500.
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