WEST MIAMI, Fla. — The bulldozers come first, tearing up the Everglades and stripping away its soil. Then comes the dynamite, blowing up the limestone that sits beneath the sawgrass. Then a 3 million-pound dragline scoops up the boulders in a bucket strong enough to lift 40 Lincoln Navigators at once. Soon the rock will end up in sidewalks and sewer pipes, highways and driveways. "That rock is money," said Johnny Arellano, manager of CSR Rinker Co.'s quarry here. "It would be nice if it wasn't under the Everglades, but we go where the rock is." Half the Everglades has been eliminated. Now the rest is supposed to be resuscitated. But here at the western frontier of Miami sprawl, rock-mining firms are digging up another 21,000 acres of Everglades wetlands. The Army Corps of Engineers, the agency in charge of wetlands protection, has warned that the mining plan "will have an irreversible significant impact on the environmental resources of this region." It will destroy more wetlands in the Everglades than the Corps permitted to be destroyed nationwide last year. But the Corps is not blocking the plan -- or even fighting the plan. The Corps is promoting the plan as a key element of its $7.8 billion Everglades restoration project. The "Lake Belt" mining plan is the starkest evidence that Everglades restoration is not just about restoring the Everglades. It calls for the Corps to wait until the rock pits are mined out in 35 years or so, then spend $1 billion to convert two of them into huge storage reservoirs: one for drinking water and additional flows to Biscayne National Park and one for Everglades National Park. The premise is that sacrificing Everglades fringes as big as the city of Miami can help save the ecosystem. But no one is sure the 80-foot-deep pits won't implode, or burst, or contaminate Miami-Dade County's drinking water with deadly bacteria. A study by the South Florida Water Management District suggested the pits would make more water seep out of the Glades -- in an area in which the Corps plans to spend hundreds of millions more to prevent that. Other agencies have blasted the plan's technical uncertainties and ecological risks. Even an internal Corps e-mail called it "a steal" for the miners, noting that "political entities play an enormous role in this particular beast." For example, Gerardo Fernandez, Gov. Jeb Bush's Lake Belt Committee chairman, is a former vice president of Rinker, which has donated $90,000 to the Florida Republican Party since 1996. "We did the best we could," said Fernandez, who is also a Bush appointee on the water district's board. "We went out of our way to balance all the interests: economic development, property rights and the environment. It wasn't easy." In many ways, the Lake Belt plan is a microcosm of all that is questionable about America's largest, most complex and least understood environmental project. It promises clear and quick economic benefits to well-connected Florida interests, but only speculative and faraway ecological benefits that rely on an expensive technological gamble. It was grounded in environmental concepts, but it lost environmental support as details emerged. And it was justified by a key assumption: that it is unrealistic to expect this state of Disney dreams and Cape Canaveral ambitions to change the land-use patterns that obliterated so much of the Everglades in the first place. Similar objections have been lodged about the overall Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan that President Bill Clinton signed into law Dec. 11, 2000, with wide bipartisan support. But to the Corps and its water district partners, the Lake Belt is a perfect example of the plan's allure, an everybody-wins solution to a difficult situation. They say the plan will respect the property rights of miners who already own land in the area, while steering their quarries as far from the park and the county's wellfields as possible. It will harvest 1.7 billion tons of limerock that will promote economic growth. It will create rectangular water bodies that won't be true biological "lakes" but will block Miami-Dade's seemingly unblockable westward sprawl. If the new technology works, the Lake Belt will eventually boost local water supplies and help rehydrate the Everglades. The vision, as one Lake Belt report put it, is "Making a Whole, Not Just Holes." "This innovative, comprehensive, cutting-edge approach will be a win-win for the environment and the public needs of Southeast Florida," the Corps says on its Web site. The Corps has even contended the plan will help remove exotic melaleuca trees that have invaded Everglades wetlands -- which is true. But it's a bit like promoting mountaintop-removal coal mining to reduce hiking accidents. On a recent Lake Belt tour, biologist George Dalrymple said with a smirk that the plan offers everything but the formula for a tastier Hershey bar. Dalrymple is a scientist, a Staten Island native who has spent his career doing academic research in Florida's swamps. But the Lake Belt has turned him into an activist. As he slogged through a sawgrass prairie designated for digging, Dalrymple showed off a flock of snowyegrets, a clump of grayish algae, a zebra butterfly. Then he pointed to the roaring machinery at work nearby -- framed by a gray moonscape of 20-foot-high piles of crushed pebbles that might end up paving over more sawgrass prairies someday. "Does that look like a restoration project?" he asked. He wasn't smirking anymore. BUILDING AN OCEAN Joe Podgor was a confidant of the late Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the bard of the Everglades; he used to run her grass-roots group, Friends of the Everglades. It was Podgor who ghostwrote her most famous line: "The Everglades is a test. If we pass, we may get to keep the planet." And it was Podgor who dreamed up the Lake Belt. His story, and the Lake Belt's, helps illustrate how the road to the Everglades restoration plan was paved with good intentions. Podgor, 56, describes himself as a "fat jerk from Miami Springs." He became an activist in the 1960s because pollution was ruining his favorite fishing canal. Soon he founded a group called Save Our Water to try to protect Miami-Dade's wellfields and underground aquifers. He helped stop some condo projects, some strip malls, a Blockbuster theme park. But there were many more projects Podgor couldn't stop. He says he got sick of power politics and rubber-stamp regulators and enviros who cared more about birds and bunnies than their own water. Mostly he got sick of losing. It seemed like nothing but the ocean ever blocked development in South Florida. That's when he had a gloomy epiphany. "It just hit me," Podgor said. "We needed an ocean on the west side of town." The mining firms, he decided, were too powerful to stop. They donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to state campaigns; the Legislature specifically exempted them from state wetlands laws. Their product also is the fuel for Florida's development-driven economy. South Florida limestone has helped build the state's roads, bridges, homes and parking lots, not to mention Disney World and Cape Canaveral. Every day, 3,200 trucks and 400 rail cars full of crushed rock leave the Lake Belt, carrying 40 percent of the aggregate used in Florida's concrete. "Yeah, the miners are influential. That's because we need those holes in the ground," said state Senate Majority Whip J. Alex Villalobos, a Miami Republican whose father has lobbied for Rinker. "What are we going to do, import bricks from a castle in Europe?" So in 1990, Podgor met with a group of miners at Rinker's corporate offices to present his plan for a Drinking Water Protection Zone, the precursor to the Lake Belt ("Dwpz. Like a faucet -- get it?"). The idea was to define where the miners could and couldn't mine. The miners would get the go-ahead to turn a massive strip of shallow wetlands into deep artificial lakes. But when they finished digging, they would have to give the lakes to the public for recreation. They could not convert unmined areas into lakefront subdivisions. And land around the wellfields would be off-limits, as would the area's westernmost tract of wetlands, known as the Pennsuco after the Pennsylvania Sugar Co. (Sen. Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat, and Philip Graham, the late Washington Post publisher, were among the Pennsuco's few human residents when they were young.) Today, Podgor bristles when activists who were on the sidelines during his earlier battles call him an "industrial sympathizer" for trading away Lake Belt wetlands. He notes that regulators had never shown the slightest interest in protecting those wetlands. The wetlands were on the wrong side of the Everglades levee that usually marks the outer limit of westward sprawl. They had been invaded by melaleuca, the thirsty Australian tree that was imported to help drain the Everglades. Podgor figured his plan at least would leave the Pennsuco wetlands and his man-made ocean as a buffer between development and the levee. And even fake lakes can support decent bass fishing. "What the hell were we supposed to do?" he asked. "If you can't lick 'em, you gotta join 'em." So the miners took Podgor's idea to Tallahassee, with a dear friend of former governor Lawton Chiles leading their lobbying effort. The Legislature set up a committee of the stakeholders, and soon had the outlines of a consensus plan. In 1997, the Legislature approved a 50-year mining blueprint, over few objections. That consensus, said Tom MacVicar, is a key point to remember. MacVicar was once a deputy director of the water district; he helped develop the Everglades hydrology model that is being used in the Everglades restoration plan.Now he is a consultant to the mining industry -- as well as the sugar industry and other clients -- and he believes it's time for environmentalists to accept the inevitable. "Look around: This is a growing state, and it needs rock," he said. But the Lake Belt consensus has unraveled. The caustic Podgor was ousted as director of Friends of the Everglades and replaced on the Lake Belt Committee by a former Drexel Burnham Lambert broker named Barbara Lange. She didn't pay much attention at first because she was busy fighting a nearby airport proposal. But in 1999, the Corps unveiled its Lake Belt environmental analysis, noting that the plan would eliminate 15,000 acres of "irretrievable" wetlands, in addition to 6,000 that already had been permitted. The analysis predicted "significant negative impacts" to native vegetation, wildlife, water flows and water quality. Nevertheless, the Corps proposed to issue permits approving 50 years' worth of mining. Suddenly Lange was paying attention. "I was like: What? Are you out of your mind?" said Lange, the Sierra Club's Everglades coordinator. "You read the details, and it's just one outrage after another." 'A BLIZZARD OF CONTRADICTIONS' Lange wasn't the only one worried about the Lake Belt, which she insists on calling the Rock Pit Belt. National Park Service officials have described the area as "the last remnant of the short-hydroperiod marshes that are critical to the proper functioning of the Everglades ecosystem." The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Environmental Protection Agency, Miccosukee Tribe and Miami-Dade County aired concerns as well. So did the Everglades Coalition, the voice of local environmental groups -- even though some activists fretted in e-mails that alienating the rock miners would be dumb politics. But the decision was up to the Corps, which oversees wetlands protection under the Clean Water Act, even though it has destroyed more wetlands than any developer. Nationwide, the Corps approves 99 percent of all requests to drain or fill marshes, streams and other wetlands. This mind-set was on display after Sept. 11, when the chief Corps regulator sent out an e-mail to staff nationwide: "The harder we work to expedite issuance of permits, the more we serve the Nation by moving the economy forward." In Florida, developers sometimes withdraw applications for damaging projects after Corps regulators raise objections, but when they don't, the Corps' approval rate is well above 99 percent. A recent e-mail from a frustrated Corps regulator here alleged that his bosses no longer even consider blocking projects, because the district commander, Col. James G. May, refuses to sign denials. "All we do is document the destruction of the aquatic environment," the regulator wrote. "If we have no denial power we have no power and I am wasting my time and your money." May said he has no blanket policy against denials, but prefers to work with applicants to reduce the impact of their projects. In the Lake Belt, the Corps did scale back its proposed 50-year, 15,000-acre mining permit to a first phase of 10 years and 5,400 acres. But the entire 50-year plan remains in place, and May approved the first-phase permit on April 11. "This is one of the most complex decisions I've made," May said. "We're taking a balanced approach." Not everyone thinks so. For example, Corps regulators are supposed to ensure "no net loss" of wetlands, requiring enough "mitigation" to compensate for any destruction. In the Lake Belt, the Corps approved an unusual mitigation deal the mining firms extracted from the state, requiring them to pay 5 cents to an environmental fund for every ton of rock they sell -- less than 1 percent of the usual price. "That's sinfully cheap," Dalrymple said. May said the fund should help remove melaleuca from 7,200 acres of the Pennsuco marsh in a decade. Still, in an internal e-mail, Corps regulator Charles Schnepel called it "the cheapest mitigation since sliced bread." "It's like they're in two parallel universes: one for Everglades destruction, one for their supposed Everglades restoration," Lange said. The critics are equally skeptical that the money will help the Pennsuco. Fish and Wildlife warned in a 2000 letter that "the long-term viability of the Pennsuco wetlands is questionable." The water district's own computer models found the Lake Belt mines would increase seepage from the Pennsuco by up to 34 percent, which would drain the marsh and could attract more melaleuca. Meanwhile, a separate $730 million component of the restoration plan envisions higher water levels for the Pennsuco, which could drown the marsh. And most Miami-Dade developers are already using the Pennsuco for their mitigation, so the mining money may be redundant. "It's a blizzard of contradictions," said Richard Grosso, director of the Environmental and Land Use Law Center in Fort Lauderdale. "The American people should be up in arms about this. It's an absolute scandal." Increasing seepage is a particularly serious contradiction, because one key goal of the restoration plan is to reduce the water seeping out of the Everglades through its porous underground aquifers; the Corps even wants to build an impermeable "seepage barrier" extending far below the levee. The Lake Belt literally undermines those efforts. And with one mine proposed just 1,000 feet from Everglades National Park, park officials have warned that the Lake Belt could "rob" their water and "pose a serious threat to the restoration." "You're going to have extremely high rates of seepage," said Kevin Cunningham, the U.S. Geological Survey's Lake Belt hydrogeologist. "The only question is how high." Scientists from EPA and Miami-Dade County have another question: Will the Lake Belt contaminate the wellfields with potentially deadly microbes, such as giardia or cryptosporidium? A crypto outbreak in Milwaukee's water supply killed 100 people in 1993. "That's a very serious concern," said Pedro Hernandez, assistant Miami-Dade County manager. More than 1 million people drink from those wells, which would be far more susceptible to bacteria once rock removal exposed the groundwater to the air. The county may have to spend $75 million to $250 million to upgrade its treatment facilities. That's why Miami-Dade's water and sewer department drafted a proposal last year for a 15-cent-per-ton mining fee, but it was withdrawn after mining lobbyists met with county leaders. "The miners clearly know how to play the game," said Mario Diaz-Balart, a GOP state legislator from Miami who hopes to join his brother Lincoln in Congress. Similarly, when Miami-Dade zoning officials discovered that Rinker had mined an off-limits area, county environmental officials quickly asked them not to "put anything in writing," a memo shows. When a Miami-Dade task force was investigating whether Lake Belt blasting was damaging homes, Diaz-Balart and other legislators pushed through an amendment insulating the miners from liability. In one internal e-mail, National Park Service mining engineer Phil Cloues complained that the Lake Belt plan was infected with "Chamber of Commerce bias." "The power and politics that drive these plans have enormous momentum," Cloues wrote. "I would suggest that Everglades National Park has more national and international importance (even economic) than depletable limestone mining. . . . Florida is in a state of cannibalism, eating itself to increase its infrastructure." John Hall, the top Corps regulator in Florida, does not exactly disagree. He got to Florida in 1979, and he has watched the disappearance of the Everglades with dismay. Hall knows that Corps permits have enabled this growth: "When I fly over Florida, and I see these developments I helped approve, I just say, 'Oh my God.' " But he believes the Corps reflects societal values, and since the 1950s, society has encouraged rock mining in western Miami-Dade. And he doesn't want to get sued for infringing on property rights. "We could keep this area pristine if we had a dictatorship," Hall said. "Or if Congress decided it was so interested in Everglades restoration it was going to buy this land. But that hasn't happened, so we're making the best of the situation." CONFRONTING THE UNKNOWNS The Lake Belt began as a simple mining plan. Now it accounts for one-eighth of the showcase environmental project of the new millennium, a project officially committed to expanding the "spatial extent" of the remaining Everglades. The Corps plans to spend $1 billion -- eight times the entire federal budget for endangered species -- to turn two depleted Lake Belt quarries into storage tanks. "They were looking for new places to park water, so they figured, hey, why not?" MacVicar recalled. It was cheaper than buying land. But only if it works. To understand this engineering challenge, imagine a leaky in-ground swimming pool. Then imagine sinking a concrete wall or rubber barrier around it to contain leaks. Then imagine it were 120,000 times the size of an Olympic pool. "I'd say the major concern is that we don't know if they'll hold water," said Cunningham, the geological survey's Lake Belt expert. Sydney Bacchus, a hydrologist who studies the effect of Florida's aquifers on wildlife, was less circumspect: "It's a scam! A farce!" The Corps hopes to save money by leaving the bottoms of the pits unlined, but it's not sure the bottoms won't leak. It hopes to let water fluctuate up to 36 feet inside the reservoirs, but it's not sure their walls won't disintegrate. It hopes this underground activity won't damage the aquifer, but it's not sure about that, either. The Corps is not even sure the reservoir water will be clean enough to deliver to Everglades Park. "There's a lot we don't know yet," said Richard Punnett, the chief Everglades hydrologist for the Corps. Then he paused. "We do know it's going to be expensive." The Everglades plan includes a $23 million pilot project to test the quarry-to-reservoir technology. But it won't be finished until 2011 at the earliest. By that time, half the Lake Belt should be mined. MacVicar said his clients don't particularly care whether their pits will work as reservoirs, anyway. "They just want to mine, and they have that right," he said. Everglades National Park, on the other hand, will have to wait 35 years for its Lake Belt water -- assuming the miners do not go out of business or slow down their schedule. The restoration plan will create several other reservoirs in the area much sooner, but only to store water for farms and communities. The park must pin its hopes on the quarry-to-reservoir scheme, one of four untested technologies at the heart of the plan. The point, says chief park scientist Robert Johnson, is that the much-ballyhooed restoration of the River of Grass is a faraway if, while the little-noticed benefits for miners, farmers and drinkers are tangible whens. "I hate to be rude, but isn't this supposed to be a restoration plan?" he asked. Today, even Podgor thinks the Lake Belt is a bust. He wanted public design and ownership of the lakes, along with wide, grassy banks to attract wildlife and security berms to discourage dumping. He didn't get them. He calls the idea of sending quarry water to the Everglades an "idiotic" effort to disguise the giveaway as a boon to the environment. Podgor has left activism; he sells computers for a living now. "They fouled up the deal of the century," he said. "They gave the miners their cake and let them eat it, too." In a way, the point of the Everglades restoration plan is to let people have their cake and eat it, too. Corps officials prefer a similar confectionary analogy: "expanding the pie." Stuart Appelbaum, the agency's top Everglades manager, readily acknowledged that as long as nature must compete with agricultural and urban users for the same water, nature will suffer. "We don't want to fail like that," Appelbaum said. The only way to break the cycle, he said, is to expand the pie, to capture enough excess water to keep everyone happy and rescue the Everglades. The promise of an expanded pie forged the remarkable coalition that pushed the restoration plan through Tallahassee and Washington -- a promise that united developers, sugar barons, citrus growers, water utilities, Indian tribes and rock miners with a host of environmental groups. Now the restoration's leaders say the strange bedfellows who came together in 2000 must stay together to help them keep the promise. And EPA and Fish and Wildlife recently backed off longstanding threats to fight the mining permits. "The key to everything is preserving the coalition," said Michael Parker, who was the civilian head of the Corps until President Bush ousted him in March for complaining about budget cuts. "If we get stuck in litigation, Everglades restoration is doomed." If Parker is right, restoration is in trouble; environmentalists can't wait to litigate the Lake Belt. Bradford Sewell, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, believes the plan violates a slew of environmental laws. For example, the Corps concluded there was no Endangered Species Act problem because an industry consultant reported no wood storks in the area. But a recent water district study found 1,400 of the park's 1,600 storks nesting five miles from the Lake Belt edge. On many issues, the Corps proposed future studies, but the miners can start digging now. "Common sense and the law requires -- at a bare minimum -- a lot more study," Sewell said. "Otherwise, we're going to be horrified when we look back in 10 years." The Corps is trying to shed its reputation as an enemy of nature, and the Everglades is its Exhibit A. Hall said he "can really empathize with the environmentalists on the Lake Belt." But Hall also empathized with the miners, who have invested in draglines and railroads and mills with the expectation that they would be allowed to keep mining. "They've spent hundreds of millions of dollars, and they deserve to be heard," he said. For decades, development has been the norm in South Florida. Just last month, Jeb Bush's former business partner persuaded the county to extend its urban boundary to approve a massive warehouse in the Lake Belt area. It is unfair, Hall said, to expect the Corps to overturn those norms overnight; it is not a purely environmental agency, and it cannot focus exclusively on Everglades restoration. The Corps, he said, must strike a balance. "I'm not trying to put a smiley face on this," he said. "But I'm not the king or the land-use czar. We might not like what's happening here, but this is how it is." Articles from "The Swamp" series:
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