South Florida Sun Sentinel, March 10, 2o24
When Steve Davis jumped out of the airboat and into the water in the middle of the Everglades, it rose to just below his waist, higher than last year when it pooled around his knees.
“I’m standing in Miami-Dade’s water supply right now,” he said.
Davis, the chief science officer for the Everglades Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to restoring the ecosystem, joined Meenakshi Chabba, the foundation’s ecosystem and resilience scientist on Friday morning for the annual Everglades airboat tour. The tour comes amid growing progress on the Everglades Agricultural Area Reservoir and an allocation in the state’s 2024-25 budget of more than $740 million dedicated to Everglades restoration.
The EAA Reservoir and allotment of federal and state funds are both critical pieces to the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP), which Congress authorized in 2000. According to the National Park Service, the plan is supposed to “restore, preserve, and protect the south Florida ecosystem while providing for other water-related needs of the region, including water supply and flood protection.” It’s the largest hydrologic restoration project ever undertaken in the United States.
The natural flow of the Everglades has been degraded by farming, road projects and land development, resulting in the flooding of some areas, drying out of others, and hypersalinity in Florida Bay, which has killed off crucial seagrass areas in Everglades National Park.
This year, the impacts of El Niño created a wetter winter and warmer ocean temperatures, and though South Florida was spared from any direct-hit from tropical storms or hurricanes this past season, water levels in the Everglades are higher than normal — “about four inches above schedule,” Davis said.
High water levels may harm native wildlife and prompt the Army Corps of Engineers to lower Lake Okeechobee by sending polluted water to vulnerable estuaries on the east and west coast.
Thus the importance of the impending EAA Reservoir only grows, with Davis referring to the $4 billion-dollar project as a “bypass surgery” for the glades.
“Everglades restoration is about reconnecting the lake to the south,” he said. “(The reservoir) allows us to take water from the lake, store it, clean it and send it south.”
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