River’s Ills Tied to Range of Sources

From a bird’s view, it looks like someone dropped a giant tea bag in the St. Lucie River, then drizzled bright green paint along the shores.

River advocates say it’s a portrait of the estuary in crisis: rusty brown water and giant algae blooms fed by the freshwater discharges from Lake Okeechobee.

Oysters are dying.

The dolphins are gone.

And many fear it won’t be long before anglers start seeing sick fish.

But water managers say the big lake is only partly to blame.

Giving helicopter tours to local media Friday, water managers said they hoped to show that heavy rain and local storm-water runoff are also behind the drop in the river’s salinity, the algae blooms and, most likely, a jump in bacteria levels.

“All of these areas, all over, have had a good amount of rain,” said Susan Sylvester, a water management technical specialist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which along with the South Florida Water Management District manages Lake Okeechobee.

From the chopper, Sylvester pointed out giant puddles in vacant lots along the river’s north fork and drainage canals with swift currents that poured quickly through control structures.

Ditches such as the C-23 and C-24 Canals, which dump into the North Fork of the St. Lucie River, aren’t connected to Lake Okeechobee but are brimming with local storm-water runoff rich with pollutants.

River advocates agree local runoff isn’t helping the ailing estuary. But they say the bigger problem is Lake Okeechobee, which has swelled with recent rains to reach its highest level for this time of year in seven decades.

On Thursday, water managers started discharging about 2.4 million gallons of fresh water per minute into the St. Lucie Canal, which empties into the brackish St. Lucie River near Stuart.

The latest round of releases, about double the volume that had been flowing for weeks into the canal, will continue until the lake is brought down to 16.25 feet above sea level.

Without much rain, it probably will take three or four weeks to reach that level, Sylvester said. But if rains push the lake level higher, water managers might have to crank up the volume on discharges to the estuary.

Last year’s hurricanes have left Lake Okeechobee milky brown, like coffee with creamer. Most of its submerged plants have died because sunlight can’t reach far below the surface. Levels of phosphorus, a byproduct of fertilizer, have doubled since the storms.

At Port Myaca, the water gushed through the spillway Friday, flooding the St. Lucie Canal with a light brown stream topped with white foamy froth.

From there, the water traveled toward Stuart through the canal, which looks as though it’s been filled with melted Hershey bars. When the tide is outgoing, local residents and fishermen have reported seeing a dark brown plume stretching from the river.

Many fear a repeat of 1998, when scores of fish in the lake turned up dead and diseased. But state scientists say it’s too early to predict that.

“There are so many environmental conditions that you have to have,” said Boyd Gunsalus, a biologist with the water management district.

Aside from the influx of fresh water, factors such as high water temperature, heavy rain and high nutrient levels go into the equation for fish kills, Gunsalus said.

Even without sick fish, the river could be too far gone to recover any time soon, some activists say.

Health officials on Friday renewed a public health warning to stay out of a 5-mile swath of the river between the Palm City and Evans Crary bridges. Levels of fecal coliform bacteria, found in human and animal waste, have remain elevated there for more than a month.

State scientists still don’t know the source of the bacteria but say the mix of fresh water and warm water temperatures allow the fecal coliform bacteria to thrive.

rachel_harris@pbpost.com