Now You See It, Now You Don't

By Natalie Angier

Built by the Army, a river channel will be filled in by Florida

Crouched beneath a gentle morning sun last week, Florida Governor Bob Graham grinned broadly and, with a muddy splash, dropped a baby cypress tree into a hole filled with water on the bank of the Kissimmee River. As he shoveled soil on the roots, a group of ebullient environmentalists crowded around him, laughing and applauding. "This is the heart that pumps the blood," said Graham of the river. "Our goal is, by the year 2000, the water system will look and function more as it did in the year 1900 than it does today." And with the turnaround, naturalists predict, the fledgling cypress will grow up to 30 ft. tall.

By the time the historic groundbreaking ceremony was completed, Graham had planted not only a tree but the seeds of destruction for one of the most disastrous projects ever undertaken by the Army Corps of Engineers. Twenty years ago, the corps spent $29 million on the construction of a 52-mile channel along the 98-mile Kissimmee, punctuated by locks every ten miles or so. The purpose: to control the seasonal flooding that spilled over the river's banks onto 60,000 surrounding acres, destroying property and jeopardizing tourism. Now, in the first rejection of a corps' project ever, the South Florida Water Management District could spend up to $65 million to undo the Army handiwork and return the channel more or less to its original course.

Next month engineers will ram the first of three corrective steel barriers, or weirs, into the channel bed to readjust the river's flow. In the project's second phase, they will begin dumping dirt into six miles of the channel once so carefully scooped out. If all goes well over the next 15 years, the river will gradually rise and engulf the artificially dry plains that surround it, transforming them back to the lush, mosquito-ridden swamps they were for hundreds of thousands of years.

The reason for the unprecedented turnabout is the dire effect the channel has had on the complex ecology of South Florida. The Kissimmee is a strand in the northern section of the extensive tangle of the region's streams and rivers. Some of the waters, including the Kissimmee, feed into the gigantic water system that supplies drinking water for the 4 million inhabitants of southern Florida. Others snake off to submerge the Everglades and nurture its water-loving fowl and alligators. When the 200-ft.-wide, 30-ft.-deep channel was completed and the Kissimmee's annual overflow was eliminated, two-thirds of its adjacent marshland, or 20,000 acres, shriveled up, taking with it the plants and animals dependent on the wet-and-dry cycle. Bald eagles, which feasted on the marsh fish that flourished during the summer flood each year, declined catastrophically; their population is currently only 26% of its prechannel total. Mottled ducks and coots are down by 93%, and alligators have disappeared from many areas. Says Johnny Jones, head of the Florida Wildlife Federation:

"It was one of the most gorgeous areas on earth before they dug the dirty ditch."

Supporters of the channel, however, insist that the dry plains are as ecologically sound as the wetlands were, and there is some truth to their argument.

Wild hogs, quail and turkeys have replaced the eagles and ducks; cattail and buttonbush, rather than arrowhead and maiden cane, speckle the pools. Certainly, ranchers and the majority of tourists prefer the changes. With grass growing where algae once sprawled, cattle have a wide pasture for grazing. Winter or summer, fishermen can hook a bushel of plump bass, and sailors can navigate the predictably calm waters. Declares Bill Morse, of the Kissimmee-Osceola Chamber of Commerce: "It's a recreational paradise."

Indeed, with so much money invested in the channel, the environmentalists might have lost the battle had not the rest of the state's waterways been in such abysmal shape. Southern Florida is so overbuilt and its rivers so depleted or disturbed that wetlands everywhere, including the Everglades, are seriously threatened. The state decided to act before it was too late, and the extensive Kissimmee marshes seemed a natural place to start.

Although some critics insist that a technological failure cannot be fixed with more technology, scientists and Florida officials are optimistic about the river's chances. When the Kissimmee district reflooded 800 acres of the plain 13 years ago, shrimp, crayfish and other aquatic life immediately returned. Although nobody expects to duplicate the original marshland leaf for leaf, some experts believe that al most all the dry land could revert to swamp. Says Florida Environmentalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas: "This is a very important step toward the restoration of the whole Kissimmee-Okeechobee-Everglades basin." The cypress tree, for one, can hardly wait.

-- By Natalie Angier.

Reported by Grant Segall/Miami

With reporting by Grant Segall