Essential Florida Lake in Life-Death Struggle : Environment: Runoff from sugar cane fields and dairies into Lake Okeechobee causes oxygen depletion. Drought adds to the problem of algae.

Thunderheads were building to the southwest as Steve Loyd fired up his bass boat to join the dawn parade of fishermen heading out of the channel. “I don’t mind getting a little wet,” he said, glancing warily over a shoulder, “but if it starts to sparking--well, even I won’t stay out there then.”

Out there is on Lake Okeechobee, America’s second-largest freshwater lake and, even after 18 months of drought, still perhaps its hottest spot for largemouth bass. As one of the busiest guides on the lake, Loyd, 44, has seen trophy hunters fly in from Canada, catch a 10-pound “hog” within hours and be on the next plane out with the prize on ice. Even when there is lightning in the air he hates to miss a day on the lake.

Once out of the “no wake” zone, Loyd pulled gently on the throttle and the 200-horsepower engine lifted the boat’s flat bottom to the surface. In seconds, the guide and his two passengers were skimming past the saw grass at 55 m.p.h. The storm clouds kept their distance to the south and sunlight flashed through the scud, turning the shoreline reeds to gold and highlighting snow-white egrets stalking the shallows.

About five miles north of the marina, Loyd cut the engine and lowered a quiet trolling motor off the bow. Three casts later he had his first bass of the day, a feisty 2-pounder.

“Sure doesn’t look like Lake Okeechobee’s dying, does it?” he asked a little later as the catch began to pile up in the well. Sure doesn’t, his passengers agreed.

Yet, as Paul Parks of the Florida Wildlife Federation put it, “The fish are often the last to know.”

Lake Okeechobee is indeed in danger, not only because insufficient rainfall has left it 5 feet below its normal level, but also because of a severe chemical imbalance caused by phosphorous runoff, chiefly from manure and fertilizers on nearby dairies and farms. In fact, the good fishing Loyd and his clients enjoy may be due in part to the shallow water, which concentrates the fish, and in part to the added nutrients feeding a surge of plant life in the lake.

“A lot of fish can be terribly misleading,” warned Florida conservationist Nathaniel P. Reed, who served as an undersecretary of the Interior in the Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford administrations. “All hypereutrophic lakes are terrific fisheries until they collapse. Actually, the lake is in acute distress.”

On the eve of South Florida’s usual six-month rainy season, words such as hypereutrophic (describing a body of water in which an overgrowth of plants leaves insufficient oxygen for animal life) are heard more and more. Almost everyone, including Republican Gov. Bob Martinez, agrees that the 730-square-mile lake is in trouble. Non-native cattails are spreading and, during summers of normal rainfall, a runaway green algae bloom covers acres of the surface with a pea-soup slime that even the Ghostbusters couldn’t clean up.

For most of the 4.5 million people who live in a coastal crescent along the rim of Florida, life without Okeechobee is neither imaginable nor possible. The lake, about 30 miles across at its widest, feeds fresh water into the Everglades and recharges well fields from which drinking water is drawn.

But disagreements over what to do about the problems, and even the urgency of the situation, run deep.

The South Florida Water Management District in April adopted a plan for reducing the amount of phosphorous being discharged into the lake and the Everglades. Half the $90-million cost of instituting and enforcing the limits would be paid by sugar cane growers and truck farmers.

Some environmentalists say the measure is not tough enough. “We don’t have a lot of faith in that plan,” said Joe Podgor of Friends of the Everglades, a lobby headed by 100-year-old author and activist Marjory Stoneman Douglas. “We think it’s a great way to slow restoration down, so when the lake dies it will happen during someone’s else administration.”

In what he acknowledges is a proposal sure to be unpopular with farmers and politicians, Podgor is pushing for an immediate shutdown of the dairies around the north shore and total prohibition on drainage from farmlands into the lake.

“This arguing about how many tons of phosphorous are permitted to be dumped into the lake has got to stop,” he said. “All this is just preparing the patient for surgery; it’s not a solution.”

With the pollution, Podgor said, “we’ve taken the life span of Lake Okeechobee and condensed what was 200,000 years or more down to about 20. To make it worse, we’ve monkeyed around with water levels so that plants grow around the edge, then we drown them; they start to rot and release more fertilizer. We need action . . . while (water managers) fiddle and argue, the lake’s going to hell.”

Until the beginning of this century, Okeechobee was a balanced ecosystem feeding water to an Everglades full of birds and alligators. Then the tinkering began.

In 1905, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward was elected governor on a promise to drain the Everglades. Between 1913 and 1927, the state built a system of canals and dikes that opened acres of wetlands to agriculture. In 1928, a powerful hurricane killed 2,000 people in the Lake Okeechobee area. Two years later, work was begun on the 110-mile Herbert Hoover Dike, a wall of earth encircling the lake and effectively blocking it from the view of those who live around it.

In 1961, in the further interest of flood control, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers went to work on the Kissimmee River, which flows south into the lake. Over 10 years and at a cost of $30 million, the river was straightened. Today it is called the C-38 canal, and it runs like an arrow for 50 miles down Florida’s spine.

Almost as soon as the work was completed, state officials admitted that the Kissimmee project was a mistake. With the river’s natural curves gone, the water it brought to the lake was laden with unfiltered pollutants. As the marshes dried up, cattle were moved in, adding to the contamination. By the early 1980s, it was clear that restoring the Kissimmee River was critical to the salvation of Okeechobee. So the Corps of Engineers was invited to return, to undo what it had done. The estimated cost of restoring the curves to the river’s course: $269 million.

Preliminary work on restoration began in 1984, but the project has been stalled since then by issues of money and squabbling between the Corps and the Water Management District over keeping the river navigable.

Corps of Engineers officials say they are eager to begin a job that is unlike any they have taken on before. “After all these years of being criticized for not working on environmental issues, it’s a pleasure to wear this hat,” said Richard Bonner, deputy director of the corps’ Jacksonville office.

Not everyone concurs in the forecast of doom for Lake Okeechobee. George Wedgworth of Belle Glade said he has lived near and fished on the lake for 60 years, and he regards algae blooms and fluctuating water levels as normal. Wedgworth is also founder and president of the Sugar Cane Growers’ Cooperative. He said that environmentalists have “hollered ‘wolf!’ so often that it’s getting to be criminal. Hell, that lake isn’t dead and it isn’t dying, any more than every living thing is dying. We’re just the environmentalists’ favorite whipping boy.”

He disputed the conventional wisdom that sugar cane growers use the most water from the lake, and said that before restrictions on back-pumping, farmers returned more water than they used. As for the phosphorous in that water, Wedgworth said: “It’s in very low amounts.”

Not low enough, according to a federal lawsuit filed in October, 1988, charging the Water Management District with failure to enforce laws that would stop growers from pumping polluted water into Everglades National Park and other federal lands.

Podgor and Douglas insist that agriculture no longer has a place on the shores of the lake unless the nutrient-filled discharges are stopped. To reduce the 50,000-head dairy herd on the lake’s northwest shore, the Water Management District is buying out some farmers and paying $600 per cow.

But Podgor wants a ban on dairies and Douglas has suggested that sugar crops should be phased out of Florida. “Sugar can be produced more cheaply in the Caribbean, and I think it’s criminal that the people of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, who can’t make a living at home, come here to suffer doing the very jobs that keep them from getting jobs where they come from,” Podgor said.

In the meantime, everyone concerned with Lake Okeechobee’s health is looking to the sky and hoping for a normal rainy season, which begins in June. The mean depth of the lake was 16 feet 18 months ago; one month ago it was 11.2 feet and dropping steadily, amid what one water management official called “a one-in-300-year drought.”

Average annual rainfall here is 60 inches, according to Jorge Marban, director of water resources. “If this rainy season doesn’t come in as normal or above, we’ll be in significant trouble,” he added. Water allocations to farmers have been cut in half, and residential water use in the Miami and Ft. Lauderdale areas has been restricted for six months.

There are precedents in Florida for the collapse of a productive lake, according to environmentalists. In the 1950s and 1960s, Lake Apopka, the state’s third largest lake, just northwest of Orlando, was a mecca for bass fishermen and produced several record lunkers. Pollution-fed eutrophication turned Apopka’s waters green and useless for sportfishing.

“There were many fish camps on that lake a few years ago, but they’re gone now,” said Parks, a water quality chemist with the Wildlife Federation. “It’s a continuous algae bloom. I’d hate to see that here.”