Florida Levee Casts Long Shadow

It’s been the backyard hill that children rolled down, with a popular hiking path above canals and cane fields stretching to the horizon. The grass-covered ridge affords townsfolk a soothing breeze off the broad, shallow waters of Lake Okeechobee.

Now the levee circling Florida’s largest lake looms as a landmark of potential disaster. The crumbling, 70-year-old earthen barrier known as the Herbert Hoover Dike has been called “a grave and imminent danger” that could breach during a hurricane and inundate the 40,000 people living and working in its flood path.

In April, engineering experts forecast a 1 in 6 chance of the dike’s failure this hurricane season, a report that prompted Gov. Jeb Bush to urge federal authorities to speed up repairs and local agencies to draft evacuation plans for residents living to the south and east of the 700-square-mile lake.

The alarm bells over the dike have evoked the death and chaos that ensued a year ago in New Orleans, when Hurricane Katrina’s deluge broke through a similarly weakened levee holding back Lake Pontchartrain.

The New Orleans scenario is unlikely here, because the territory surrounding the dike is sparsely populated, flat and above the lake level, unlike the below-sea level urban neighborhoods inundated by Lake Pontchartrain.

But this area has seen its own hurricane disaster. A 1928 storm blew Okeechobee lake water over the surrounding communities, killing more than 3,000 people and leading to the dike’s construction.

The engineers’ report came as a shock to emergency planners, who had been aware of structural weaknesses but not of the dike’s heightened vulnerability during hurricanes, said Paul Milelli, director of public safety for Palm Beach County. All evacuation planning had been geared to a “sunny-day scenario,” envisioning sufficient notice of an impending breach from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which maintains the dike, and an orderly transfer of people to a way station at the South Florida Fairgrounds.

The corps has been issuing ominous reports about the dike for 20 years, warning that the undulating earthen rim that rises at least 20 feet higher than the lake surface is shot through with holes from uneven settlement of dried muck and sand from the haphazardly dredged fill used to build it.

Last year, after the Category 3 Hurricane Wilma churned the lake waters into six-foot swells and left deep gouges on the inside walls of the levee, water management officials sought an expert review. Corps contractors are filling in some of the bigger gouges and have positioned piles of rock every couple of hundred feet along the southeast rim to be available to fill any new holes dug by storm-driven waves.

Mary Cohich, 78, who lost her levee-side mobile home to Wilma, rode out the storm at her son’s home in Belle Glade, nine miles south of Pahokee but still in the path of Okeechobee’s floodwaters in the worst-case scenario.

“When that dike was put in there in the 1930s, it was like a beautiful young woman,” said Cohich, who still helps out at lunchtime at Mister Jellyroll’s bakery and cafe. “But with all these years of neglect, she’s a frail old lady now.”

To be on the safe side, the South Florida Water Management District and the corps have dropped the level of the lake so that the water inside the dike is lower than the land surrounding it.

Okeechobee is sometimes called Florida’s “liquid heart,” and the dike has become a centerpiece of hydrological choreography in South Florida. The lake collects rainwater and river flows from as far north as Orlando and releases water to the south for farming, to the Everglades to keep the vast river of grass flowing and to drinking-water suppliers in the populous coastal cities.

Dropping the level of the lake has decided downstream consequences. It can affect the quality of water fed to the Everglades and reduce the water available for Florida’s cash crops of sugar cane, vegetables and fruits.

“This can become an issue when it comes to irrigation,” said cane grower Dick Korbly, whose family farms 1,000 acres near Pahokee. “There’s a finite amount of water and when it comes down to deciding between the public and agriculture, they’re always going to furnish water to the public first.”

Like others skeptical of the recent warnings, Korbly said that the risks are overblown by politicians eager to be seen as having forecast and averted a disaster.

Severe weather such as hurricanes can push the lake level up dramatically in a couple of days, said Susan B. Sylvester of the water management district, citing a six-foot rise in July 2004 after three back-to-back storms.

Although the lake can rise quickly, lowering it is a long-term project. Corps spokeswoman Nanciann Regalado notes that even with pumps at maximum speed and floodgates wide open, it takes almost a day to drop the lake level by one inch.

Erected piecemeal and to varying height and density standards, the levee is marked with Swiss cheese-like perforations called piping from decades of uneven settlement of the fill. The piping allows lake water to seep under the foundation, gradually eroding it and threatening its collapse in places.

The corps embarked late last year on a two-year, $26-million effort to shore up the most vulnerable stretch, between Pahokee and Port Mayaca, what was to have been the first stage of a full reinforcement of the 143 miles of dike surrounding Okeechobee, expected to cost $300 million and take 20 to 25 years, Regalado said.

The pilot project had to be halted for design reevaluation after the water district engineers said the repairs might be inadequate or even harm the dike’s integrity.

That leaves emergency management officials and water regulators with little choice but to plan for evacuation and to keep the lake level well below any point where a sudden deluge could fill it to a height to which hurricane-force winds could drive it over the edge or pound through eroded sections.

Pahokee Fire Chief Gary Burroughs believes the risks of a dike failure have been exaggerated and misconstrued by those comparing the New Orleans scenario with Lake Okeechobee.

“There’s still people out there who think the dike’s going to bust and a wall of water is going to crash on them,” Burroughs said. But he conceded that people in this town have become complacent about safety, and hoped the New Orleans experience, as much as it differed, served as a cautionary tale.

Unlike other hurricane-vulnerable areas of Florida, the Glades communities, as the handful of small towns in the sparsely populated western edge of Palm Beach County are known, have few shelters to which people can evacuate because of the flood risk.

The plan developed in recent weeks to move people out ahead of a hurricane involved marshaling hundreds of buses to collect those without transportation to shelters in the populous eastern part of the county and to neighboring Broward and Martin counties.

“Every community has its own unique issues. Here, we have language -- large numbers of people who speak Spanish and Creole,” said Oscar Alvarez, recently Belle Glade’s interim city manager. About 2,000 migrant farmworkers from Latin America and Haiti come for the harvest, at the height of hurricane season, swelling his city to about 17,000. He estimated that as much as 30% of that high-season population lacks the means of getting out without public assistance.

County workers have been distributing leaflets printed in the area’s most prevalent languages and explaining in radio broadcasts the need to leave if the order is given. The city is also considering sirens to alert people in the fields when and if it’s time to seek safe ground.

Those responsible for public safety say the need for evacuation is less about the fear of drowning deaths and more about avoiding having thousands stuck in a flooded region without clean water, electricity or emergency services. Even in the event of a dike breach, the waters probably would spread slowly across the flat countryside.

“The Hollywood version of what is going to happen -- a tsunami, where everyone is wiped out -- that’s not the case here,” Burroughs said. “The message we’re trying to get to people is that they won’t be able to live in their homes after a hurricane because there might be six inches of water in them.”