Lake O's muck too dirty for some uses

For the last two months, water managers have been scooping out polluted ooze that had strangled the shallow marshes of Lake Okeechobee.

Now, the question is what to do with a massive mound of muck that is, to no one's surprise, laced with nasty contaminants.

While most are at trace levels, arsenic spikes have eliminated the South Florida Water Management District's hope of selling the material as clean suburban fill to recoup some of the $11.4 million spent on the effort.

But Susan Gray, a district deputy director who oversees the lake, said the material poses no health or environmental threat if used properly. Water managers are weighing options -- putting it under a paved lakeside parking lot, capping an old landfill in Okeechobee County or even spreading it on farm fields.

''We've had a lot of interest,'' Gray said. ``A lot of people want that material.''

There's a lot of it to go around, nearly 2 million cubic yards of soft black stuff, enough to fill some 100,000 dump trucks.

The mix of fine clay, decayed plants and algae covers a huge swath of lake bottom and has been a festering source of pollution for decades. It is laced with pesticides, fertilizers and other pollutants from rain water running off farms, cattle pastures and lawns.

Hurricanes over the last few years churned it up and pushed several feet of muck and dark water into shoreline marshes.

The marshes, covering about a fifth of the lake, are the key to the entire ecosystem, providing critical habitat and food for everything from fowl to fish, including the lake's renowned large-mouth bass and popular panfish such as crappie and bream.

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