Everglades Group Wants C-111 Input

By Kevin Wadlow, Florida Keys Keynoter, Marathon

May 27–Florida Bay may live or die, contingent on the success of a plan to restore water flow over the southern Everglades, most experts agree.

A proposed $41 million project seen as a first step in that effort will be outlined at a 6 p.m. Thursday workshop in Homestead.

Whether the plan on the table does enough remains to be settled.

“This is the most important [Everglades restoration] project with respect to Florida Bay,” said John Adornato, Everglades project manager for the National Parks Conservation Association. “We have to get it right because we cannot let Florida Bay get any worse than it is.”

Conservation groups fear the current proposal – technically Phase 1 of the C-111 Spreader Canal under the state’s Acceler8 program – falls short, Adornato said.

“None of [the proposed alternatives] calls for filling the C-111 Canal or adequately plugging it, and that’s what we need for Florida Bay,” he said.

Islamorada fishing guide Mike Collins, a board member of the South Florida Water Management District that is forwarding the current plan, called the project an essential first step.

“No one thing is going to save Florida Bay,” Collins said. “This is a big piece of the puzzle. This is the fundamental groundwork to get it going.”

“Will this [project] provide 75 to 85 percent of the [bay] restoration in one shot? Yeah, I think it will,” Collins said. “We’re going to have to do this incrementally, and I’ve been waiting 30 years to get started. It’s time.”

The C-111 Canal was dug in the late 1960s to drain floodwaters out of south Miami-Dade County and create a barge canal.

The drainage worked but altered the environment by disrupting the water sheet flow and changing the natural wet and dry periods of wetland flooding. The lack of freshwater flow made Florida Bay more of a saltwater environment.

When hurricanes or an especially wet season drenched South Florida, excess water was channeled south down the C-111 Canal and dumped into Manatee Bay and Barnes Sound near Key Largo. Fish and soft corals died in the sudden environmental shifts.

The first phase of the proposed plan would create an east-west spreader canal, about five miles long, that crosses under U.S. 1 south of the Florida Rock and Sand Plant on the 18-Mile Stretch.

The shallow speader canal would join the C-111 about four miles west of U.S. 1, then pump water to the east.

“Most canals are designed to hold water in. This is designed to let water come out over the bank and onto the flat marshes north of the bay,” said Tommy Stroud, an Everglades restoration manager with the water district. “It’s diverting the water to slowly flow over the land patterns in a more natural way.”

Pumps and canals are necessary because development has made completely natural restoration impossible, Collins and Stroud said.

The current plan leaves too much to be carried out in the future, Adornato said. “They’re saying do this portion now and we’ll figure out the rest later,” he said.

A timeline for the $41 million project sees construction starting in November 2007 and finishing in June 2010.

The 6 p.m. Thursday session takes place at the John D. Campbell Agricultural Center Auditorium, 18710 SW 288th St., Homestead.

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Copyright (c) 2006, Florida Keys Keynoter, Marathon

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