Madfloridian's Journal - Florida's Lake Okeechobee levee grows weaker.

Hat tip to Ybor City Stogie for the picture and the link to the article.

Drive down US-441, and you'll run right into it. A grass-covered wall that stretches as far as you can see in both directions. It's the levee that wraps around Lake Okeechobee -- that huge lake in the middle of Florida. Altogether, the levee is 143 miles long. And the protection it gives could give way in a massive hurricane...

Today they are sounding almost desperate over something that should have been repaired years ago.

Florida levee protecting 40,000 people grows weaker each day

Levee holds back one trillion gallons of water

The Hitchiti Indian phrase "oki chobi" literally means "big water". That pretty well describes Lake Okeechobee, the largest lake in the U.S. south of Lake Michigan. But if you've never been there, you probably don't realize that it's entirely surrounded by a 143-mile-long levee. And in a monster hurricane, if parts of the levee were to give way, the word "big" wouldn't be nearly enough to describe the disaster.

"If there's a section that fails, there's gonna be a significant amount of water that comes out of the lake and runs into whatever area that it happens to be effecting," Faulkner said. "We're lucky that in Okeechobee that we've got a fantastic section of dike that's really well-maintained." Army Corps of Engineers teams say the northern parts of the dike are in excellent shape.

Southern walls are weakening

But recent studies have shown that some southern sections of the wall are weakening. More than seven decades of reinforcement haven't been enough. Tropical Storm Fay added three feet of water to the lake faster than any time on record. The Army Corps of Engineers has begun a $300 million repair project to reinforce the southern reaches of the dike, but some researchers feel that regardless of those improvements, rain from a string of storms like Fay would be enough to rip open the barrier.

Even in her most peaceful moments, that's a reality Shawna Bray can never truly forget. "It is a worry. 'Cause I don't want Okeechobee to be like New Orleans, because that was -- that was terrible," she said.

They have been messing with the ecology, with the environment, with the ways of nature in draining Lake Okeechobee, then trying to refill it with polluted farm water when they got desperate again.

Water managers on Thursday agreed to let polluted storm water that washes off farms flow into Lake Okeechobee, with the hopes of boosting water levels needed to irrigate drought-strained crops.

A month after rejecting "back-pumping" polluted storm water that drains off farms into the lake, the South Florida Water Management District Governing Board decided not to stop "back flows" — which involve opening drainage gates to let gravity carry a smaller amount of the same water into the lake.

Back-pumping offered the promise of raising the lake water but threatened to bring with it fertilizers and other pollutants that wash off farms south of the lake, leading to algae blooms and fish kills.

It looked like this last year, but yet they drained it in 2004 after the hurricanes.

This boat launch on Torry Island in Belle Glade at the southern tip of Lake Okeechobee has been rendered useless by the low water level. The Lake is on the brink of its lowest levels ever.
(Scott Fisher, Sun-Sentinel)
May 30, 2007

Here is more about how they drained it in 2004 because there was too much water. They have not bothered to repair the levee.

Lake Okeechobee at record low from drought; billions of gallons of water drained after hurricanes.

Lake Okeechobee releases stir up regrets as drought lasts.

Nineteen months ago, saddled with drowning marshes, a weakened dike and a record-breaking hurricane season, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers got to work on an urgent task: dumping billions of gallons of water from Lake Okeechobee. At the time, it didn't just seem reasonable; it seemed necessary.

Now South Florida water managers see that point in late October 2005 as a much different milestone: the start of a crippling drought.

..."Now that people cannot water their lawns more than once a week, farmers and other critics call last year's lake dumping a major blunder, and even some board members of the South Florida Water Management District have tried to distance themselves from the decision.

Now we had Fay going right across Lake Okeechobee as a Tropical Storm last week. Now we have Ike with South Florida in its path.

They have had all these years to repair when the weather was good, but they have allowed this levee to go into disrepair just like the rest of our infrastructure.

That is the end result when you cut taxes and services to the bone.