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The Everglades was once a “River of Grass”, As Marjory
Stoneman Douglas, founder of the Friends of the Everglades called it.
It flowed unimpeded from Lake Okeechobee to the Florida Bay during the
rainy seasons. For the past century men have tried to tame the
Everglades by constructing canals to drain the land, and eventually
constructing berms around the lake and much of the Everglades. Their
efforts have ultimately succeeded. Now, the Everglades has been broken
up into five major areas, the Park, three areas north of the Park,
named Water Conservation Areas by the Water Management District, and
the Everglades Agricultural Area, sever hundred thousand acres of
sugar cane farms, that lies between the Lake and the rest of the
Everglades.
This “restoration” of the Everglades, as the Water
Management District describes the draining of the Everglades in their
Brief to the Supreme Court, has caused the rapid deterioration of the
Everglades, evidenced by the growth of tens of thousands of acres of
cat tails and other invasive species, and the loss of more than ninety
percent of the bird life in the Everglades.
When Castro took over Cuba it became the policy of the
U.S. to grow its own sugar, and not be dependent on Cuban sugar. As a
result Congress passed an embargo of foreign sugar and created
subsidies for sugar grown here. This made sugar cane growing in the
Everglades feasible on a large scale; but it has also depressed sugar
farming in other countries, including Mexico, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua,
and else where.
It was the expansion of sugar production in the
Everglades as well as new practices of the Corps of Engineers and the
Water Management District to drain urban areas and discharge their
water into the Everglades that has caused the Everglades to decline so
rapidly.
The S-9 pump station drains the lands in Broward County
that have recently been subject to one major housing development after
another. When the Everglades was natural the excess water drained to
the east, into the ocean. The development in the area, including
roads, houses and other urban development, has created too much water
that is now flowing into storm water drains rather than being stored
in the ground, and there are not enough ways to take the water east to
the ocean. The solution of the Water Management District is to simply
dump the urban water into the Everglades by pumping west.
This discharge of water contains many pollutants, and
has resulted in the thousands of acres of the Everglades on the
eastern side, to be turned into cattails. That is why the Friends of
the Everglades and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians have brought the
suit against the Water Management District.
The Friends and the Tribe want the District to clean up
the water before discharging into the Everglades, or to find ways to
retain the water, in newly created lakes or ponds where the water
could serve positive purposes. Both solutions are possible.
The lawsuit is based on the terms and conditions of the
Clean Water Act. This Act was passed by Congress in 1972, after an
entire river flowing through Cleveland into Lake Erie caught fire from
the pollution in the river. The Act was specifically intended to take
over water quality restoration from the States, who were simply not
willing to make the hard decisions to clean up the water under prior
legislation. That is exactly the problem in the Everglades
Restoration. The Water Management District is not willing to tell the
sub-districts, where the urban development is occurring in Broward
County, to build the water storage areas and clean the water up before
they send it to the District’s C-11 canal. Nor is the State of
Florida, the governor, the DEP, willing to take on “Big Sugar” and
Urban Development, and make them be responsible for their pollution.
The Water Management District does not like the Clean
Water Act because it requires them to meet all State Water Quality
Standards, and to meet them at the point of discharge, and to be in
compliance each day. Both the District and the DEP want to deal with
only one pollutant, phosphorous, and to look for compliance in the
center of the Everglades, and to be able to average a non complying
discharge with one that is in compliance, and to measure compliance on
a rolling annual average, rather than each day.
To justify their position the Water Management District
has described the entire Everglades natural system as their water
management system. The District wants to be able to move water
wherever it wants to, whenever it wants to, and at the quality level
it wants to, without being required to meet the standards of the
Federal Clean Water Act.
The District argues that it does not create the
pollutants, so it is not responsible. But the District did create the
canal and the pump station specifically to allow the sources of
pollution to drain into, and then to discharge into the Everglades.
The Clean Water act does not look to who created the pollutants, but
who is discharging them into the Nation’s waters.
The District claims that it will be too expensive to
treat the water, and to meet the conditions of the Clean Water Act.
But the District fails to see how much harm it is causing and how that
will impact the entire South Florida economy if the Everglades is
destroyed because it is a dumping ground for Big Sugar and Urban
Development.
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