By: Brain Burgess, The Capitolist
Grab your poop…er…hazmat suit if you’re a Martin County environmental activist, enviro-activist newspaper reporter, or a member of any of the front groups that are financially supported by money funneled through the Everglades Foundation, because it’s that time of year again.
What time is it, you ask? Why, it’s time to join in the annual parade of “concerned citizens” who put on hazmat poop suits and oppose the freshwater discharges from Lake Okeechobee. It’s all part of a crappy plan hatched in the bowels of Bullsugar.org’s headquarters, designed to shift the blame away from their own septic tank leakage and lawn fertilizer runoff and toward someone else.
For the last several summers, the Army Corps of Engineers has made the prudent decision to release water from Lake Okeechobee so that heavy rains don’t end up blowing out key swaths of the Herbert Hoover Dike and killing off tens of thousands of people. The Bradenton Herald laid out a stark scenario back in 2013:
“In an extreme worst-case failure, the simulation extended flood waters more than 20 miles, spreading south and east across an expanse dominated by sugar farms. The deepest pools would collect in areas that have subsided by several feet after decades of farming on eroding peat soils that were once Everglades marsh. Much of the area is still farmed but homes and apartments also have been built in some of the lowest-lying areas near the lake.”
As they do most years, the heavy rains have returned, and as of June 1st, the Lake O discharges have started again.
That’s typically the cue for the protesters to dust off their biohazard protest poop suits, print out signs with clever slogans and call the local paper and TV stations to pretend the algae blooms in their river are entirely the fault of discharging water from the “polluted” Lake Okeechobee…