Okeechobee Water Level At Record Low

"BIG WATER" LEVEL SETS NEW LOW RECORD

May 2007 - The second largest freshwater lake in the contiguous United States matched its previous record of 8.97 feet set during a drought in May 2001. Lake Okechobee is disappearing, literally, into thin air while wind and warming temperatures accelerate the process. At the time of this posting, the water levels are declining about 1/3 inch per day, as the lake disappears into thin air.

Lake Okeechobee is the prinical source of drinking water for South Florida. The drinking water situation in South Florida has reached the emergency state as salt water invades drinking water wells along the coast. Historically, South Florida's shallow water aquifer, under hydraulic pressure from the vast expanse of Everglades, holds back the intrusion of salt water through Florida's porous limestone. As the Everglades and the aquifers dry out, salt water seeps in, a phenomenon that began with the draining of the Everglades and is now rapidly accelerating. Simultaneously, record wild fires are destroying hundreds of thousands of acres across the state.

Whether this is an urgent emergency depends on whether or not your believe in that liberal hoax called Global. If you are one of the effete few who believe the ravings of Al Gore, you amy take comfort in the fact that much of the state will soon be under water anyway. That will essentially negate the problem of fresh drinking water.

A brief history of the plundering of Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades.

Florida is going up in smoke and it's largest aquifer (Lake Okeechobee) is dropping precipitously. How can water be running out in a region where the average yearly rainfall is 50 inches per year? Read on.

Amazingly, in the midst of the biggest housing market crash since 1926, the development lobby continues to demand more zoning changes and more building permits. The irony of high rise condos topping off the Miami skyline, funded by speculators likely to run away from their deposits, at the very same moment water is running out is downright biblical. But we are living in biblical times, are we not? It's all part of the sad history of this beautiful peninsula, which seems to have endured more than its share of exploitation.

HOW WE CONTROL NATURE
Lake Okeechobee itself is so low lying that its waters are only 18 feet above sea-level when the lake is at its highest. But the temptation to control this swamp was too great, as the richness and productivity of the Everglades muck-land, once drained, is so great that no cost seemed too high a price to pay for a system of drainage and flood control which would make possible the utilization of this fertile soil.

It wasn’t always this way. In times of heavy rain, the lake overflowed to the south into the Everglades. But with the deadly hurricanes of 1926 and 1928, which turned the lake into a foamy monster, came calls to rein in nature. The following decade, the 140-mile Herbert Hoover Dike was constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers, an organization that has proved it's competency in dealing with water over and over again.

The earthen dike has proved ill-suited for the task at hand. State consultants last year issued a report that called the aging dike "a grave and imminent danger to the people and the environment of South Florida." Fears of a Hurricane Katrina-style catastrophe prompted the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to beef up its plans to reinforce the dike. That should help.

POLLUTION:
The flow of water from Lake Okeechobee has been manipulated for more than a century, and during that time the water has become loaded with pollutants and muck. The waters are a toxic green color caused by toxic algae, which blooms from the pollution spreading through the lake and smothers plants and fish. This algae bloom is drawing alarming comparisons to an ecological disaster at Central Florida's Lake Apopka, which succumbed to similar problems caused by a 1940s hurricane. It still hasn't recovered and is undergoing a costly restoration.

SYNOPSIS: When you drain a wetland the size of Florida, pave it with concrete and cut down lots of trees, the climate is going to change. It's going to rain a lot less. (In fact, that's what the ignorant Haitians did to their half of the island.)

First the Spaniards came looking for the Fountain of Youth. At that time, the vegetation around the lake was so impenetrable, and the land so wet, that the basin wasn't even circumnavigated until 1883. After the Seminoles were chased out, the technologically superior white people began to drain it and build crappy housing. Corrupt government let developers do whatever they wanted. Agriculture took the remaining land while politically "influential" sugar cane growers polluted the waters throught runoff.

Now it's a mess.