LAKE OKEECHOBEE, Fla. — Starting on December 7, more water will be flowing through these locks, as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers starts recovery operations on Lake Okeechobee.
“As we move forward into dry season, we are looking at Lake O recovery operations,” said Maj. Cory Bell, Deputy District Commander of the Jacksonville District on Monday.
Maj. Bell followed up on Thursday at River Coalitions meeting announcing that Corps is looking to drop lake levels on the Lake Okeechobee from nearly 16 feet to 12 feet by May 1 for 90 days or 11.5 feet for 60 days.
Maj. Bell told Fox 4 on Friday this to improve the health of the Lake.
“The last several years with having high water levels on Lake Okeechobee, the acreage of SAB or subaquatic vegetation has reduced to 3,500 acres. Ideally, the lake would have 3,700 acres,” said Maj. Bell. “So, that is an order of magnitude smaller.”
With a deeper Lake, that means less sunlight is reaching this vegetation. Which ultimately is stunting its growth.
“A lot of benefits by having the SAB, that allows mainly bass spawn, the little baby bass, can go hide under there so large predators can’t attack them,” said Maj. Bell. “It also allows the natural process of filtering and cleaning the water there. Also, by reducing the waters in the lake, impacts snail kites nesting.”
While reducing the levels of the lake will have its benefits, it also comes at a cost. Flows will increase going down the Caloosahatchee by 100 cfs to 2,100 cfs, which isn’t a lot. But on the east coast, flows will increase from 0 to 1,400 cfs, which is nearly 63,000 gallons per minute. That several environmental focused nongovernmental organizations concerned about impacts on the St. Lucie River.
“At any point we see we aren’t going to be able to hit our success metrics or if there are other issues, we can halt these recovery operations and reevaluate,” said Maj. Bell.
That includes blue green algae. If the algae starts blooming on the lake they will stop these releases. This is in part due to the new flexibility that the operating guide (LOSOM) adopted this year gives the Corps.
“Now we can look at the system from an environmental perspective or the ecology of the Lake, the ecology of the east and west estuaries, but also blue green algae that folks are really concerned about going downstream into their estuaries,” said Maj. Bell.
