When, where and how water will be released from Lake Okeechobee is now official

After 22,000 public comments, several dozen major opinion-forming events and five years of development, the new guidelines for discharging polluted water from Lake Okeechobee are now official.

The Lake Okeechobee System Operating Manual, or LOSOM, was created in response to a long-standing outcry of injustice from nearly every environmental group involved in Everglades restoration, as well as residents living along the waterways used by the Army Corps of Engineers to lower the lake's water level by releasing water that had been enriched over decades with fertilizers and urban sewage runoff.

“LOSOM will not solve all of our problems, but it will reduce the number of harmful discharges that bring huge amounts of polluted lake water into our estuarine ecosystems,” said Matt DePaolis, director of the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation.

“If more Everglades restoration projects are undertaken, we will have to worry less about the impacts Lake Okeechobee has on our coastal environment and can focus more on cleaning up our own watershed.”

Simply put, LOSOM is a set of guidelines that determine how, when and where water is released from Lake Okeechobee.

In the past, lake water has been discharged into the Caloosahatchee River, the St. Lucie River, the Lake Worth Lagoon and the Everglades.

The new regulations, officially announced this week by Brigadier General Daniel Hibner, commander of the Army Corps division that includes Florida, mean the agency must balance the need for water released with the environmental impact.

The trigger for the approval was the strengthening of 230 kilometers of the Herbert Hoover Dike that surrounds the lake. The work was completed last year after two decades and at a cost of almost $2 billion. A stronger dike can hold more water.

Conclusion: Many people whose interests were affected by the way water was discharged in the past are likely to be happier – even if the revised plans have not produced the desired results for everyone.

Now only a small amount of polluted lake water should be released east into the St. Lucie River, which flows into the already polluted Indian River Lagoon near Stuart, and smaller, useful amounts of water should be released west into the Caloosahatchee River, rather than sustained gushes of billions of gallons of water per day for months on end.

When the filter basins south of the lake are completed, clean and clear water will flow toward Florida Bay at the southern tip of the peninsula, restoring at least some of the natural flow of the River of Grass.

Friends of the Everglades is one of many nonprofit environmental organizations working closely with the Army Corps to make the new operations manual a reality.

“This is a big deal,” the group wrote in its latest newsletter. “The Lake Okeechobee System Operations Manual marks a significant change in how the Army Corps of Engineers will move water in and out of the lake over the next decade (and it is) the first plan to consider public health by balancing the risks of toxic algae in managing water from Lake O.”

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