Ecotourism in Florida - Plumbing the Everglades

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The Water Issue: Restoration Dreams
Plumbing the Everglades

In 1996, Congress asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to develop a plan to restore, preserve, and protect the South Florida ecosystem. Four years later, the Corps came up with the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP). Here's how it's supposed to work. A vast amount of freshwater from Lake Okeechobee and surrounding waterways—1.7 billion gallons a day—is currently sluiced into the ocean for flood control (see "Present Flow,"). To save that water, 330 aquifer-storage-and-recovery systems (ASRs) are being built around the lake and near the

Plumbing the Everglades

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coast so that up to 1.6 billion gallons a day can be pumped down into the Floridan Aquifer, where it will be stored until needed for irrigation, drinking water, and recharging the ecosystem (see legend and ASR diagram, above). An additional 180,000 acres of surface-water reservoirs will store up to 500 billion gallons, while 36,000 acres of storm-water-treatment areas will use artificial wetlands to clean runoff from the lake and the Everglades Agricultural Area. In an attempt to improve the historical flow from north to south, the Corps will remove old levees, raise parts of the Tamiami Trail causeway, redirect stored water through miles of new pipes and readjusted canals, and time-release it into Everglades National Park. Two wastewater-recycling plants south of Miami, in Dade County, will treat 220 million gallons a day, which will also be reflowed into the park. Strictly speaking, CERP will not "restore" the Everglades. But by 2030, 1.6 million acres of national parkland will have cleaner water—and more of it.

Map by Greg Wakabayashi

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