Reeking, oozing algae closes South Florida beaches and clogs canals

STUART, Fla. — A rancid smell penetrated the front of Marisa and Duncan Baskin's one-story house, which rests less than 100 feet from an inlet of the St. Lucie River in this tourist hamlet just inside the Atlantic coastline that bills itself as "America's Happiest Seaside Town."

But the Baskins — whose 22-month-old daughter, like Marisa Baskin, suffers from asthma — and their neighbors are not so happy these days. In the water of the inlet of their subdivision in Northriver Shores, an inch-thick layer of bubbling ooze and slime emits a stench so overwhelming that none of the neighbors go outside.

In fact, the Baskins were preparing Friday to stay with friends across town for the weekend just to get away from the green and blue algae bloom that has overtaken their small neighborhood marina, from which most neighbors have moved their boats.

"Our lives revolve around the water; we have a boat, surfboards, and there's nothing really to do here without the water," Marisa Baskin, 31, a lifelong resident of Stuart who works as a social worker at a hospital, said Friday. "And I think our governor and local politicians are to blame. This isn't the first time this has happened, but it's definitely the worst."

At play are many of the forces that define modern Florida: competing environmental, residential and agricultural interests, a failure by state officials to invest in managing the demands of growth, finger pointing between state and federal officials. The result has been an environmental nightmare playing out here, about 35 miles from the source of the problem in Lake Okeechobee.

There, an aging dike system forces the Army Corps of Engineers to release controlled discharges through channel locks east and west from the lake to protect nearby towns from flooding. However, those discharges, which carry pollutants from agricultural lands that flow into the lake from the north, pour into rivers and lagoons downstream, which eventually dump into the ocean. When too much polluted discharge from Okeechobee hits areas downstream like the St. Lucie River estuary in Stuart, for example, the blend of fresh and salt water creates giant phosphorescent plumes of algae, making the water unsafe for human and aquatic life alike.

This week, Gov. Rick Scott declared states of emergency in Martin, St. Lucie, Palm Beach and Lee counties, and Sens. Bill Nelson, a Democrat, and Marco Rubio, a Republican, both visited the scene, expressing concern.

The Corps of Engineers is dealing with a dike nearly 80 years old with structural problems. It was originally designed during a time when environmental preservation was not an issue. Engineers also have to balance the concerns of environmentalists with the need to safeguard area residents — more than 8 million people are affected by the water system, according to a corps spokesman, John Campbell.

"We're constantly having to balance the potential of an environmental impact from releasing water against the very real public safety hazard of containing the water and the hazard that poses by putting pressure on the dike itself," Campbell said by telephone Thursday from Jacksonville, Florida. "The system is so constrained that everything that was low-hanging fruit has been done so far. We are left with few options or constraints to work with."

He said the water levels the Army Corps gauges to determine how to react to discharges are between 12.5 feet and 15.5 feet. The lake is currently at 14.9 feet, roughly a foot higher than it was during the last crisis at the same time of year in 2013, Campbell said.

With hurricane season yet to come, the Army Corps still has to carefully determine how to release and plug the dikes. It takes roughly one month to release 6 inches of water from the lake, Campbell said, so if significant rains fell, the dike could have "performance issues" and the Army Corps would have to take precautions to prevent a disaster that would bring "widespread damage and problems, especially if the water goes south, which is where the water wants to go anyway."

But residents along the coast are tired of the excuses. They say there is enough blame to go around at both the state and federal levels, with Big Agriculture playing a significant role.

"Everybody's known about this problem for years — that there's a big algae bloom, and now it's worse than 2013," Richard Day, 51, who has lived in Stuart since 1973 and works as an auto mechanic at a downtown garage, said Friday. "I've got friends who captain boats and they're moving south to Jupiter in Palm Beach County. It's just sad."

Mark Perry, executive director of the Florida Oceanographic Society, based in Stuart, said the state's inability to close a deal to purchase thousands of acres of land south of Lake Okeechobee — to create a natural runoff from the lake into the Florida Everglades, where the diverse ecosystem could naturally filter toxins from the north — has been to blame for the problems being experienced by communities west and east of the lake like Stuart.

But the area south of the lake has been controlled by sugar farmers for decades, and environmentalists like Perry say state legislators in Tallahassee kowtow to agricultural lobbyists who fund their re-election campaigns.

"The flow used to go south to the Everglades, and now this is a man-made, criminal disaster," Perry said. "They, as in the state and federal government, say they can't send the water south, but they can. This is an absolute atrocity that they are allowed to continue this in the name of agriculture. This is the worst I've ever seen it."

The 2016 sugar harvest was the longest on record because of rain delays, making it also one of the most profitable on record, resulting in 2.15 million tons of sugar. Under Scott, the board of the South Florida Water Management District failed in 2015 to carry out a plan to buy roughly 47,000 acres of land from U.S. Sugar south of Lake Okeechobee that would have acted as a reservoir for the lake's runoff.

"The political leadership has not been putting the demand on the agencies to fix the problem," Perry said. "This water was never meant to go east and west — it was meant to go south."

Here in Stuart, where the algae lapped up on area shorelines, keeping public beaches closed — a first in the area — Baskin and her daughter stood outside in their front yard, wincing at the smell. She said she and her husband were considering whether to sell the home they purchased just two years ago.

No one else was seen around the neighborhood.

"Normally there are kids outside playing," she said. "But not right now — it's a ghost town."