Lake Okeechobee In Serious Trouble After Hurricanes' Churn - NYT

[hatrack]

OKEECHOBEE, Fla., June 2 - "As if Lake Okeechobee had not suffered enough indignities over time, last year's hurricanes brought another whopper. The storms churned up oozy, polluted muck that had settled on the big lake's bottom over decades, making it a soupy mess and crippling its ecosystem. The water is so muddy and so high from spring rains that sunlight cannot penetrate. Much of the lake's plant life has died, leaving its prized game fish without food or spawning grounds. Insects, birds and frogs are hurting, too.

EDIT

Predictions of Lake Okeechobee's demise are nothing new - at least since swampy, subtropical South Florida became a crowded human habitat. The lake, one of the nation's largest, once spilled south in lazy sheets, feeding the marshes and sawgrass prairies of the Everglades. But after it overflowed and killed thousands of people during hurricanes in the 1920's, and after disastrous flooding in the 1940's, a 35-foot dike was built around the lake's 730 square miles. Its troubles began then.

Government engineers now control the lake tightly, often keeping it high as a backup water supply and sometimes, as they did after the hurricanes raised the lake nearly six feet, pumping excess into canals and the sea. This guarantees a reserve of water for farming and drinking, but the unpredictable weather and the competing interests that water managers juggle make it highly imperfect. The phosphorus-laden muck - mostly runoff from farms around Lake O - worsens problems both natural and manmade.

"The hurricanes were an act of God," said Paul Gray, a biologist for Audubon of Florida, "but the gunk they stirred up in the lake is the result of our own mismanagement for the last 50 years." The current crisis is so bad that the state may sharply lower the lake next spring, creating drought conditions that would allow light to reach the bottom and help vegetation return. But that plan creates a whole new controversy. Pumping out that much water could harm the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee Rivers, which flow east and west from the lake and carry its overflow to sea. It would also leave farms and utilities without much of their backup water supply, a problem if rainfall is scarce."

EDIT

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/national/05lake.html?

[Mika]

1. On phosphorus-laden muck - 2 words.. Big Sugar

Sugar:
Long-Term Contribution Trends
http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.asp?ind=A1200

[pretzel4gore]

2. the old men leave it to their children

fortunately, the children are mostly busheviks and deserve everything they gonna get:

http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=21387557
snip>
Renowned Funds Manager Predicts Global Economic Collapse
By Al Martin

(May 30) There was an interview on CNBC of the renowned funds manager Julian Robertson. He is one of the greatest of the
old-timers. 53 years on the Street. He manages the Robertson group of funds. They used to call him, still do call him
´Never Been Wrong´ Robertson. He has predicted every economic cycle, every debacle, every bull market, and every bear
market. Of course, he´s a very old man now. But his reputation on the Street is like nothing you could imagine. When the
segment of his interview was through, his comments alone took the Dow Jones down 50 points. Just on his comments alone.
That´s how powerful this man´s reputation is.

Robertson was actually a teary-eyed, an old man. When Ron Insana asked him about his predictions, he said that he´s worried
about the speculative bubble in housing and the fact that more than 1/4 of all consumer spending is now sustained by that
bubble, plus the fact that 20 million citizens could lose their homes in a collapse of the speculative bubble in housing,
and that the Fed and, indeed, central banks worldwide would act in concert out of desperation to reinflate the global
economy in the process, creating an inflationary spiral unheralded in the economic history of the planet.

Insana then asks, "Where does it end?" And he said, "Utter global collapse." Not simply economic collapse; complete
disintegration of all infrastructure and of all public structures of governments. Utter, utter collapse. That the end is
collapse of simply epic proportion.

In 10 years time, he said, whoever is still alive on the planet will be effectively starting again
<snip
reposted from earlier DU thread