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Section 5 Formulation of Alternative Plans

EAA Storage Reservoirs Revised Draft PIR and EIS February 2006

5-4

4. Meet agricultural demands within the EAA. This is the current condition.

Water is provided to meet the needs of agriculture.

5. Increase flood protection within the EAA. Water could be backpumped

(this is allowed under current law without having to treat the water) from

the EAA to storage within the lake to reduce flood damage.

This management measure and location was rejected because the harmful

impacts to the Lake Okeechobee littoral zone would outweigh the benefits and

this is consistent with the “Options for Consideration” by the Governor’s

Commission for a Sustainable South Florida, 1995. The lake’s natural resources

are dependent on the littoral zone since it provides nursery areas, spawning

areas, foraging areas, and roosting areas required for the completion of life

cycles. The frequency and duration of inundation of the lake littoral zone would

increase with higher lake levels under a revised regulation schedule, which

would have severe impacts on the littoral zone. High lake stages result in loss of

beneficial littoral zone plant communities in favor of introduced exotics (e.g.,

torpedo grass) as well as impacts to wading birds and other water-dependent

wildlife. Higher lake stages are also associated with increased in-lake nutrient

loading, turbidity, and increased frequency of blue-green algal blooms (SFWMD,

2000).

During development of the CERP, it was important to make progress toward all

ecological and hydrological targets; achieving a target in one area or toward

some planning objective should not cause damage to another area or be at the

expense of other objectives. While it was not possible to achieve every

performance measure target, resulting in the need to make trade-offs among

competing objectives (e.g., between providing additional storage in the Lake

Okeechobee region and minimizing impacts to the lake’s littoral zone),

guidelines were established to set priorities among performance measure

targets. One of the guidelines was that Everglades restoration should not cause

additional, long-term ecological damage. Since there are other means of

providing storage adjacent to Lake Okeechobee without causing ecological

damage to the lake’s littoral zone, this option (increased in-lake storage) is

determined to be less effective and less acceptable than other regional storage

options included in the CERP recommended plan (D-13-R) (USACE & SFWMD,

Final Feasibility Report, 1999). It is anticipated that an additional 0.8 feet of

storage in the lake would result in significant habitat loss. Evaluations

performed during the Restudy indicated that this would result in a reduction in

140,000 habitat units.

It was also noted that increasing the capacity of Lake Okeechobee would result

in an increased risk of regulatory releases to the Atlantic and Gulf estuaries and

the Everglades. Such regulatory releases would occasionally be necessary to

keep the lake level from exceeding maximum levels and would be expected to

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