Wet season’s trash is dry season’s treasure

Peak water has hit the swamp early,

But the big news is all the water slipping away to tide into the gulf.

Freshwater is gushing out of the Caloosahatchee at nearly 10,000  cubic feet per second, that’s 4 times the normal wet season peak.

The primary conduit for that is the Caloosahatchee River via releases from Lake Okeechobee its upstream source. You may have noticed recently if you’ve gone to the beach that the gulf is kind of gunky.  While we can’t blame that all on Lake releases, it does point to the larger fact that fresh water along the entire coast, some controlled through gates and others just as storm water runoff, is being dumped to tide.  That locally pollutes the shallow coast causing the unclear water, and thus begs the question:

“Is dilution really the solution to pollution,

And if so how long will it take (for the water to clear)?”

This historical calendar is color coded to match the hydrograph above, thus allowing you to see the data decades into the past.

The only sure answer to that is the end of the wet season.

That will also be about the same time (i.e. start of the dry season) we start wishing we had found a way to hold on to all (or even just some) of that wasted water and sent it south where it used to go instead.