Lee County won’t have to worry about more than 14 billion gallons of extra water hitting the Caloosahatchee River from a lake drawdown near Kissimmee.

Water managers on Thursday approved a deal with farmers to store more than twice that on farms around Lake Okeechobee.

Officials and environmentalists from the west and east coasts begged the South Florida Water Management District to stop the lowering of Lake Tohopekaligia, or Toho as it’s commonly called, because both estuaries were already suffering from heavy flows all summer.

Estuaries are the brackish waters where rivers meet the sea, and they provide nurseries, protection and food to most marine life at some point.

The water from Toho is draining into the Kissimmee River to Lake Okeechobee, which can’t keep much because it’s suffering from high water levels, too.

The lake was at 15.9 feet above sea level Thursday, and although the lake is slowly going down, water managers said chances were slim the lake would drop to an ideal 13.5 feet by June, the beginning of the rainy season.

When Lake Okeechobee has too much water, it is usually released to the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers.

Water managers and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said Toho needs the drawdown to continue to be healthy. It’s one of the best bass fishing lakes in the country.

“It’s the same thing as three years ago when we were letting water out of Lake Okeechobee,” said Trudi Williams, the Southwest Florida representative on the district board. “We have got to clean it or it’s going to get worse and worse and worse, and where does that end up? In Okeechobee and down the Caloosahatchee.”

The Toho drawdown had already been postponed twice since 2001.

“The agricultural community and Seminole Tribe enthusiastically and voluntarily stepped up to the plate to offer their help by offering to store the excess water on their private lands,” said district Executive Director Henry Dean in a written statement. “We’ve been working around the clock for the past three weeks to make this happen. I commend them for sharing the responsibility of managing our water resources and offering a workable solution.”

The farms include A. Duda & Sons, U.S. Sugar, Gerber Groves, Lykes Ranch, Alico Farms Corp. and Hilliard Brothers.

“I think the agricultural community should be commended,” said board member Hugh English of LaBelle. English said the farmers will get little or no benefit from storing the water.

Much of the water will likely be held in private reservoirs and canals.

The district will reimburse the farmers for any extra cost this causes them, estimated to be at least $50,000 altogether.

“That’s pretty cheap storage,” English said.

The state is also installing pumps on its Holey Land Management Area and stormwater treatment areas south of the lake.