Plan Six, The Only Fix

Nothing else—nothing—will really curtail the astounding discharge agonies facing the two big estuaries east and west of Lake Okeechobee.

Meanwhile, we humbly suggest that all the elaborate multi-million-dollar drainage projects now being promoted with expensive fanfare and glowing government pronouncements are just fiddling while Rome burns.

All of the works in progress will save just a few drops out of the discharge bucket. That bucket sloshed 855 billion gallons of polluted fresh water last year from the lake to the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers, causing incredible losses of wildlife and life-quality values.

So what's Plan Six?

It's simply a plan to create a storage flowway southward from Lake O through about 20 percent of Big Sugar.

In most years this new storage flowway would capture a lion's share of the billions of gallons of water now shunted, preposterously, to the oceans.

But is Plan Six someone's quick dream drawn on a napkin at lunch?

No, the fact is that Plan Six represents a concept devised and endorsed by the most experienced and qualified scientists in Florida.

And yet, government, acting in Big Sugar's best profit interests, has squashed the flowway plan for many years.

The Plan Six words were simply the numerical designation for one alternative detailed by none other than the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in a Reconnaissance Report leading to the ten-billion-dollar fix that isn't. That was 12 years ago.

While not officially endorsing the option, the report noted: “This plan provides even further restoration of the South Florida ecosystem.” The National Audubon Society and others recommended similar efforts.

A year earlier, the Science Sub-Group of an overall Working Group issued a lengthy report which included a phrase that stopping the excessive east-west discharges “is absolutely critical to the restoration effort.”

Take a gander at the report and the list of top government scientists who signed it at www.sfrestore.org/sct/docs/subgrouprpt/index.htm.

The beauty of Plan Six is that it gets down to basics and spells out specifics for the flowway.

The Corps specified the bordering levees and the changes that could be made, and even calculates the locks' enlargements to take south some four billion gallons a day out of the lake.

Certainly our government made, and continues to make, a colossal mistake by ignoring the flowway idea.

Of course, many of the projects you see headlined at every turn, are somewhat helpful for local watersheds and limited treatment.

But to address the big muddy picture, the fix is Plan Six.

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