Lake Okeechobee, the largest lake in Florida, has an average depth of only nine feet (2.7 meters).
I can’t explain why this bothers me so much, but something about it being so big and yet so shallow just creeps me out. I find it unsettling, okay? Mentally, it makes me feel like noodles, if that makes sense.
It’s the eighth-largest (freshwater) lake in the country but I’ve swam in deeper pools at the YMCA. Why did they make it like that?
For reference, Lake Michigan has an average depth of 279 feet (85 meters). Okeechobee is a puddle in comparison.
I don’t know, maybe this makes me sound insane, but looking at pictures like this and knowing that it’s just so shallow all the way across just makes me feel weird.
Like, you couldn’t even scuba here. I mean, I guess you could, but why would you? Just snorkel.
(Disclaimer: absolutely do NOT snorkel or scuba in Lake Okeechobee because of the aforementioned 30,000 alligators it contains)
Okay, so it’s a very shallow lake, but guess what? It also used to flood all the time. Thousands of people have been killed in its floods.
Thankfully, the flooding thing is much more under control these days, but it’s taken a long and incredibly dumb journey to get here.
If preventing floods was your job and your first idea was “drain the lake,” then congratulations, you would have gotten along so well with these dudes in the 19th and 20th centuries. They would have thought you were really onto something.
Look, I don’t think it’s entirely accurate to say “humans love draining stuff,” but it’s happened often enough throughout history that I’m starting to get a little concerned.
There was that crazy plan to lower the Mediterranean Sea by 660 feet (200 meters) for insane colonialism reasons.
There was that one time an oil rig accidentally drilled a hole in the bottom of a lake and drained it into an active salt mine (miraculously, no one died).
Hell, just last month, they accidentally drained a lake in Minnesota after a flood control valve malfunctioned. (Make that 9,999 lakes, I guess.)
(these links are all wild btw, you owe it to yourself to click at least one of them)
And among the stupidest and most ambitious efforts to drain something that shouldn’t be drained, there was that one time several times humans have tried and failed to drain the largest wetland ecosystem on the North American continent – the Everglades.
Why drain the Everglades? Don’t we like the Everglades? Don’t we like wetlands?
Well, yes, but back then, people thought this land was “absolutely valueless in its natural condition.” With regards to the Everglades, people thought it was straight garbage, yuck factor x100, please drain it as soon as you can so I can start growing cotton and tobacco on it, thanks very much.
According to historian Christopher Meindl, “From the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, the United States went through a period in which wetland removal was not questioned. Indeed, it was considered the proper thing to do.”
So yeah, people hated wetlands. People wanted ‘em gone.
Floridians have been chomping at the bit to catastrophically alter one of the country’s greatest natural resources since before Florida even became a state.
One guy went to the Everglades in 1837, and instead of coming home and saying “Why, heavens, the sawgrass prairies were the most enchanting thing mine eyes have ever rested upon,” or however they talked back then, he had the following to say:
Could it be drained by deepening the natural outlets? Would it not open to cultivation immense tracts of rich vegetable soil? … Would such draining render the country unhealthy? … Could the waters be lowered ten feet, it would probably drain six hundred thousand acres; should this prove to be a rich soil, as would seem probable, what a field it would open for tropical productions! What facilities for commerce!
The U.S. Congress clearly agreed with that “What facilities for commerce!” part, because in 1842, they asked for a report on “the practicability and probable expense of draining the everglades of Florida.”
That report, the first published study about the Everglades, said, “The Ever Glades are now suitable only for the haunt of noxious vermin or the resort of pestilent reptiles,” so in other words, they were super on board with the idea of draining it, too.
The first attempt to drain the Everglades was undertaken by a guy named Hamilton Disston.
In 1881, Hamilton purchased 4,000,000 acres (16,000 km2) of land at 25 cents per acre, an area larger than the state of Connecticut and reported to encompass “nearly half of Florida” at the time.
The New York Times described this as “What is claimed to be the largest purchase of land ever made by a single person in the world,” which is pretty much how I felt when I signed the lease on my first college apartment.
Hamilton wasted no time in “implementing his ambitious plan to drain an area the size of a small state.” This plan was “launched with great enthusiasm but little scientific understanding or inquiry,” which is a theme you will see repeated numerous times throughout this post.
Everything seemed to be going great at first – the drainage canals Hamilton built were working as intended and water levels were decreasing. However, this illusion of success all took place during Florida’s dry season.
Once the wet season came along, it became clear that all this water wasn’t going anywhere. The wetlands would remain wet as hell.
Thankfully, though, it doesn’t sound like all this water caused any catastrophic flooding in the surrounding communities, which is really great and definitely isn’t going to be how it always goes for those poor fuckers.
Unfortunately for Hamilton, his plan was a failure and he was forced to sell a lot of his land at a loss. Fortunately for literally everyone else, his huge land purchase got everyone really excited about the idea of going to Florida, which led to a boom in tourism and land value.
The second attempt to drain the Everglades was made by Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, a man with a very cool name who became governor of Florida after campaigning primarily on the issue of draining the Everglades.
Here’s Broward selling himself to voters:
“It would indeed be a commentary on the intelligence and energy of the State of Florida to confess that so simple an engineering feat as the drainage of a body of land above the sea was above their power.”
A commentary on their intelligence indeed.
Governor Broward asked an engineer, James Wright, to come up with a plan to drain the Everglades, so Wright wrote a report that essentially said, “this is going to be so easy and it’s going to create such great farmland and there won’t be any negative consequences whatsoever.”
The real estate industry was really excited about this because they stood to benefit immensely from all the new land created by a successful drainage of the Everglades. So to boost the credibility of Wright’s report, the industry “energetically misrepresented this mid-level engineer as the world’s foremost authority on wetlands drainage.”
However, the report had some really huge errors, and one of Wright’s colleagues would later testify to the U.S. House of Representatives, “I regard Mr. Wright as absolutely and completely incompetent for any engineering work.” Which is all a very long way of saying that this plan didn’t work either.
Anyway, real estate still got even more valuable after all this, and they named Broward County for failed Everglades drainer Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, so things worked out okay for everyone in the end.
More on that “real estate got really expensive” part – developers sold tens of thousands of plots to unsuspecting people who drained their bank accounts only to show up in Florida and find their brand new land underwater. Uh oh!
These people had been promised land that could yield crops within eight weeks of arrival, but for some of them, it took over two months for their land to simply not be underwater anymore. Oops!
Unfortunately for these newly minted Floridians, things would go from bad to worse.
Once the water drained from their land, all their animals and equipment got stuck in the mud.
Once the mud dried, it turned to a fine black powder and created nasty dust storms (assuming it didn’t burn up in a muck fire first).
These poor souls couldn’t farm anything and also had to deal with mosquitoes, snakes, and alligators. It was an all-around certified bad time.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture ended up releasing a pamphlet telling everyone how much this land sucked, but the good upstanding people of nearby Fort Lauderdale would not stand for this assault on their property values, so they gathered together all the pamphlets and burned them (lol)
Despite all the energy put into draining the Everglades, Lake Okeechobee (at the north end of the ecosystem) still periodically flooded its banks.
How did they solve this problem? Well, we know that “drain it more” wasn’t an option because they clearly loved draining this stuff.
Instead they built a levee, “about forty feet wide at the base and built of muck, sand, clays and shell — construction materials that had been in disrepute since biblical times.”
The levee was 21 feet tall, which was “below the historic high water elevation of the lake,” so I think you can see where this one is going.
During several storms across the next few years, the levee was breached and also partially collapsed at one point, killing hundreds of people.
So, they decided to spend a bunch more money to raise the levee another five feet. Or, as one author put it, “The Everglades Drainage District then decided that the fix needed even more fixing.”
But before they could complete the work, the area was hit by three hurricanes in the space of about a month, so the lake flooded again and killed over 2,000 people.
At this point, “the state’s water control schemes had grown from hopelessly unsuccessful to an outright menace to public safety,” so they called in the reinforcements (the federal government).
In 1929, the U.S. Senate got together and said, “You know what would probably fix this problem? Enlarging the drainage canals, raising the levee to 31 feet (9.4 m), and covering it with riprap, among other things.”
And then President Herbert Hoover showed up to see the lake in person and told the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, essentially, “yeah, what they said,” so they got to work building the Herbert Hoover Dike, one of the largest lake levees in the world.
Did this giant dike work? Did the 143 miles of dikes work? Let’s see what Wikipedia says:
The enlarged water control structures around Lake Okeechobee and in the Everglades did not prevent either frequent floods or dry spells in which cattle died for lack of water and fires burned in the peat of the Everglades.
So yeah, that’s a no. A big ol’ drought (technical term) ensued!
Miami residents started getting ocean saltwater in their wells, and when they asked an expert why the hell this was happening, he found out that the water in the Everglades was actually the groundwater for the area. The groundwater appeared on the surface here! I didn’t think it was allowed to do that!
Eventually, they got things under control, but I’m not sure how much I trust this dike to not fail again.
There haven’t been any further efforts (that I know of) to drain the Everglades, but don’t worry, people have engaged in plenty of other environmentally catastrophic activities down there!
In 1969, as Miami International Airport’s operations were beginning to outgrow its capacity, the powers that be decided it was time for a new airport.
This new airport would be built six miles north of Everglades National Park. It was planned to have six runways for supersonic aircraft like the Concorde, which was just beginning to fly in commercial service.
And you know what? This airport was going to be stupidly big. I couldn’t decide which fact to share to demonstrate just how huge this airport was going to be, so I’m going to share all of them:
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5x the size of JFK (the airport, not the person)
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Larger than O’Hare, Dulles, LAX, and JFK combined
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“covering more land than the entire city of Miami” , also accompanied by “a projected community of 1,000,000 people”
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Would have been the largest airport in the world at the time
The Dade County Port Authority was so excited about their huge new airport idea that they just started buying up land without consulting anyone – not the Department of the Interior, not the management of Everglades National Park, not the local authorities in charge of flood control.
No, these people who definitely should have been told about the airport ahead of time all learned about the plan to build the airport along with everyone else when it was announced in the newspaper (lol)
The Port Authority initially said the airport would only consist of a single runway for training commercial pilots, but this was what we in the industry call a “fucking lie.”
Once word got out about the new airport plan, it started getting negative attention from local media and conservation groups. The Port Authority, however, was undeterred:
At first, the Port Authority laughed the conservationists off as “butterfly chasers.” In an interview, the Deputy Director stated, “regardless of what the environmental plan might dictate, however, [w]e’re going to build the jetport.”
But the pressure from the “butterfly chasers” was effective, and the Department of the Interior ordered a study looking at the potential impacts of the new airport.
(Fun fact: this was first ever environmental impact study conducted in the state of Florida. Does Florida still do those? Honestly who knows)
The Department of the Interior took one look at the airport plan and said, “Development of the proposed jetport and its attendant facilities … will inexorably destroy the south Florida ecosystem and thus the Everglades National Park,” to which the director of the Dade County Port Authority responded, “I’m more interested in people than alligators. This is the ideal place as far as aviation is concerned.”
Many national politicians also came out against the plan, including Wisconsin’s Senator Gaylord Nelson, who said, “Either we stop the jetport at the present site, or we publicly admit that we are going to destroy the park.”
For a second, it seemed like “destroy the park” was the option they were going to go with, but then Richard Nixon of all people stepped in to nix the plan and establish Big Cypress National Preserve instead.
Construction was halted after just one runway was completed. This runway was used by Pan Am and Eastern Airlines to train their pilots until eventually flight simulators came along and the runway was mostly useless again.
What remained was Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, an obscure runway in the middle of nowhere that only saw about 39 flights per day as of 2018.
So in the end, the big crazy airport ended up being basically nothing at all. Anyway, what’s it being used for today? Hopefully nothing insane, right? Hopefully nothing that advances a dystopian fascist agenda, right? Right?
Anyway, it’s all bad. Maybe they should have just built the airport instead?
Ok, well, this is a weird note to end the post on, but I simply have nothing more to say about the Everglades or Lake Okeechobee or the distressing state of affairs in the US of A, so I’m going to set you loose to (try to) enjoy your weekend. Bye!
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