Are you worried about suffering through another algae outbreak?
“We’re beyond worried,” said Ed Stout. “We’re living it.”
Stout owns South River Outfitters on the St. Lucie River, where swirls of toxic green slime have defiled the estuary since early June. Scum of an otherworldly virescent hue has accumulated along river banks, in coves and marinas, under docks and piers and waterside decks.
It’s a wondrous thing to see, like something from a 1970s SciFi horror flick — Invasion of The Killer Slime — when the wind packs the green dross into foamy layers, inches deep, that the sun bakes it into a reeking gelatinous cake, thick enough that birds can walk on the stuff.
It’s a sorry sight — and a sorry smell — for someone in the waterways tour and kayak rental business. Business is off 75 percent.
Stuart is suffering 2016 redux. Two summers ago, a massive algae bloom — AKA toxic cyanobacteria — nearly scuppered local water sports businesses. Tourists were hardly interested in fishing or kayaking or paddle boarding or surfing through green foam that smelled of Sulphur and rot. People complained of burning eyes, headaches, flu-like symptoms, respiratory problems, rashes. Waterside dining lost its allure. Riverfront living became a misery.
During the 2016 infestation (the eighth since 2004), I talked to Sebastian Lahara, who on a normal summer workday would have been leading paddling expeditions out of Tri-Athletica, his sports shop located on an inlet off the St. Lucie River. But few paying customers were interested in guided tours through the green iridescent river scum. “The summer is lost,” Lahara told me.
Two years later, the prospect of another summer season stunted by algae was too much for Lahara. He told me Tuesday that he was abandoning the kayaking business he started 11 years ago. He’ll try to make it, instead, selling athletic apparel and high-end bicycles. “It was devastating, but it was a choice I had to make.”
Not that this comes as much of a surprise. (Though state leaders feign shock with each new algae outbreak, as if they’ve just discovered gambling in Casablanca.) Environmental scientists have been warning Florida that the watershed lake was an environmental catastrophe since 1969.
In 1999, the state legislature even created the Harmful Algae Blooms Task Force to find ways to stop these infestations. But legislators didn’t like what they were hearing and stopped funding the project in 2001.
So the noxious stuff still flows into the St. Lucie Canal from Lake Okeechobee, a virtual catchment pond for algae-spawning nutrients washing off farms and ranches around the lake, from the leaky septic tanks, even from the suburbs south of Orlando.
Then, last summer, Hurricane Irma churned years-worth of farm nutrients that had accumulated on the lake bed, creating a formula for a very nasty 2018. By last week, 90 percent of the lake surface was obscured by algae scum.
After the wettest May in Florida history (24.22 inches in Stuart alone), the U.S. Corps of Engineers — worried about pressure on the old earthen dike around Lake Okeechobee — decided water levels must be lowered.
The Corps opened spillways, dumping billions of gallons of defiled lake water into the St. Lucie estuary to the east and the Caloosahatchee River to the west, where a similar algae outbreak has enveloped waterways around Fort Myers and Cape Coral. “The spatial scope of this bloom is just enormous,” John Cassani of the Calusa Waterkeeper told the Palm Beach Post.
Unhappily, our political leadership has long prioritized the wants of inland agriculture over the needs of coastal communities. Though the state (after years of dawdling) finally funded a reservoir south of the lake to cleanse 60 percent of the lake discharges last year, the original plans were reconfigured to appease agriculture interests. Critics now worry that when the reservoir is finally completed, seven years down the road, it won’t be wide enough, or shallow enough, to do much good.
Sounds bleak, but Jordan Schwartz, owner of Ohana Surf Shop in Stuart, has a bit of hope. “The good thing is that it’s an election year,” he said.
Indeed, Gov. Rick Scott, who just happens to be running for the U.S. Senate, has suddenly — after seven years in office — started railing about the algae crisis (albeit without offering much in the way of solutions). Last month, U.S. Rep. Brian Mast showed up on the floor of the House of Representatives with a jar of scum-green river water.
Someone must have noticed. The Corps announced on June 28 that discharges into the St. Lucie would be curtailed for nine days. That didn’t help the folks on the Caloosahatchee side of the lake, but for the folks along the St. Lucie, it was at least a temporary reprieve from disaster.
Like Jordan Schwartz said, it’s an election year.
