Keep the floodgates closed!

It’s been five days since the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers paused harmful discharges from Lake Okeechobee to the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers and Lake Worth Lagoon; the respite is supposed to last a total of two weeks, with discharges resuming April 13 at lower levels.

The floodgates should stay closed instead.

The harm inflicted by the discharges has been immense. Blue-green algae is present in both the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee, threatening another “lost summer” of grotesque gunk, health concerns, business closures and nationwide media attention.

Last week at a meeting of the Rivers Coalition in Stuart, South Florida Water Management District Executive Director Drew Bartlett said his agency had requested that the Army Corps cease harmful discharges to the northern estuaries, recommending no releases to the St. Lucie and Lake Worth Lagoon and a maximum of 2,000 cubic feet per second to the Caloosahatchee.

The Corps should heed that advice and give our estuaries the chance to bounce back. Because if we keep pounding them with harmful discharges — one day they won’t.

Meanwhile, our latest Deep Dive notes that if all the water sent south this year by the SFWMD had come from Lake O (instead, more than 90% was runoff from the Everglades Agricultural Area), there’d be no need for discharges. Indeed, right now the lake would be at 12 feet, 8 inches — instead of 15 feet, 2 inches.

And that would be within spitting distance of the 12 foot, 6 inch level the Corps would prefer to the lake to be at the start of the rainy season.

Even splitting the STA capacity 50-50 between EAA runoff and water from the lake could have lowered the lake by as much as 21 inches.

Our report details how stormwater treatment areas, or STAs, work well to clean water — but they work almost exclusively for Big Sugar, which gets first dibs on capacity. But the numbers tell the tale; if Big Sugar had to share, the estuaries and the lake itself would be far better off — as would all of us who depend on them.