Okeechobee's treasures and toxic muck

LAKEPORT, FLA. — Conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas once famously grumbled that Lake Okeechobee, the liquid heart of her beloved Everglades, had been poisoned by man's careless disposal of "pesticides, fertilizer, dead cats and old boots."

She didn't know about the 1920s steamship, rusty anchors, tractor tires, fishing-boat motors, settlers' stovepipes, Native American tools and jewelry, and the bones of man and beast dating back thousands of years. All were hauled from the lake bottom this summer.

Drought has caused the second-largest freshwater lake in the United States to drop to its lowest level since recording began in 1932, and the shoreline's recession has exposed trinkets, treasures and trash from throughout the ages.

Archeologists and historians are excited by the potential insight into the little-known lives of South Florida's earliest inhabitants.

But the lake's shrinkage has also left a monumental cleanup headache: a bathtub ring of toxic sludge from dumped wastewater and the objects hurled in by hurricanes and litterbugs.

The slimy gray lining, if not a silver one, is that the drought has given water managers an opportunity to scoop out the muck and refresh the shoreline habitat for Okeechobee's flora and fauna.

In little more than two months, contractors with the South Florida Water Management District have hauled away 2 million cubic yards of sludge — enough to fill nine football stadiums from the field to the nosebleed seats, said Tom Debold, water district supervisor on the muck-removal project.

After the muck was scraped and temporarily stored in 20-foot-high mounds set back from the shore, scientists discovered that much of it contains excessive levels of arsenic from pesticides and fertilizers used until the 1960s.
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