In numerous recent documents related to the CERP, the Corps
of Engineers states that many of the problems now facing the Everglades are the
result of “unanticipated effects of the existing C&SF Project” [emphasis
supplied by the incredulous author]. Another favorite Corps phrase describing
what happened in south
Florida
is, unintended adverse impacts. Believe that unadulterated nonsense and there’s
a large, well-developed island in the
Hudson River
I’d love to sell you cheap.
Shame on us if we ever accept uncritically the meretricious
drek that spews out of the mouth of the Corps. In the C&SF Project,
Congress directed to Corps to dry out the Everglades,
an activity which by definition changed the water quantity. So people could use
the land for agriculture. Which naturally also changed the water quality. As a
direct result of the Corps’s work, farmers could sink mega-millions in the land
without fear of losing their investments through flooding. Big surprise that
the Corps’s extensive drainage activities were successful and its mandated
objectives were achieved.
By the Corps’s own estimate, about one-half of the
Everglades has been lost to agribusiness and urban development and the once
nearly 103-mile long, meandering Kissimmee River
was converted into a 56-mile long concrete canal separated into five artificial
sections. Countless other rivers, sloughs, and streams have been canalized or
otherwise severely altered. And the Corps maintains with a straight face that
those problems were unanticipated? Or maybe the appropriate word is unintended.
Either way, the Corps’s explanation is a bunch of unadulterated, self-serving
crap.
If you, Gentle Readers, are unable to figure out that the
Corps of Engineers has been dissembling to the public about their culpability
in the destruction of the Everglades, delete
all evidence of this blog from your computer. Seriously. Because nothing I can
say or do will help you out of that mindset.
Okay, for those skeptics out there who think I should cut
the Corps a little slack, I’d like to refer you to the critical enabling
legislation that made the destruction of the Everglades
possible, The Flood Control Act of 1948. House Document No. 643, which was the
basis of the Act, contains a highly significant statement.
The parched prairies
and burning mucklands of the Everglades in
1945, the flooding of thousands of acres of farms and communities in 1947, and
the intrusion of saltwater into land aquifers of the east coast are basically the results of altering the
balance of natural forces. [Emphasis added by the author]
Exactly who was responsible and how was that balance
altered? By drainage systems designed by civil engineers and water managers
working for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. So much for inadvertent
consequences. In 1948 even the Washington
politicians knew what had happened to south Florida. It didn’t take a PhD in biology or
ecology to understand who caused the environmental imbalances and why. But,
naturally that insight is beyond the analytical ability of the Corps. Which is
one reason I’m so critical of that integrity-challenged agency. Actually, who
out there trusts people or institutions that lie as a matter of normal
practice? Which defines precisely the Corps of Engineers throughout its
extensive organizational career.
Everyone with a functioning brain has recognized the
mistakes made when the Corps canalized the Kissimmee River and promptly
destroyed its associated wetlands and Lake Okeechobee
as natural systems. Today, that’s a no-brainer. But the real question is
whether the Corps actually learned any lessons from its past egregious errors
and destructive environmental practices. Well, to find the answer all you have
to do is to look in two key places. First, check out what the Corps identifies
as recommended actions in its Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. Which,
you may remember was approved by Congress in the omnibus Water Resources
Development Act of 2000.
Here’s one critical example from the CERP. I realize the
following fact has been mentioned several times before but it bears repetition
and explanation in this specific context. Each day approximately 1.7 billion
gallons of excess water are drained from the Everglades
to the coast. That’s right. Each and every day of the year. That’s the figure
provided to the public by the Corps itself. Since it can be difficult for us
non-engineers to get a handle on such a gigundus number, here’s a measure to
help everyone understand exactly how much water we’re talking about. If that
annual water loss (620.5 billion gal/year) were pumped through a 4-inch pipe,
the pipeline would start from Lake Okeechobee
and wrap around the Earth’s Equator 7,200 times, extending some 180,000,000
miles. No joke. Do the math if you don’t believe me. Or get a civil
engineer/hydrologist to do it for you, which is what I did. Another way to look
at it is if a pipeline that long were to blast out of southern Florida for outer space
and rocket all the way around the Sun, it would just about make it back to
Earth. The truly sobering fact is those 620.5 billion gal/year water losses
occurs each and every year. So, when you see that 1.7 billion gallons per day
number, you should think about the Corps’s water management technology and our
tax-payer dollars that make it possible.
The second place we should look is at what the Corps has
been doing in the western part of the Everglades and in the Big Cypress
Swamp. Well, the truth is
the Corps has not covered itself in glory there either. In late November 2002,
the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) and the Council of Civic Associations
issued a report titled, Road to Ruin,
that in part stated: “The Corps’s regulatory division is allowing the dismantling
of watersheds while its planning division is using public funds for restoration
programs in the same ecosystem” [Author’s
Note: Emphasis is contained in the original document]. The NWF charged the
Corps with ignoring its own rules and with violating Federal law with respect
to environmental impact statements and issuing permits that seriously
jeopardize the western Everglades through
over-development. That behavior is the very same that nearly destroyed the
Kissimmee River and the eastern Everglades.
The only explanations for those Corps actions are
institutional stupidity or caving in to sustained high-level political
pressure. With the greatest confidence I would bet my house, cars, three
children, six grandchildren, and all my retirement funds on the latter.
According to the NWF, the Corps of Engineers and SFWMD, the
two agencies officially charged with protecting wetlands by overseeing wetland
filling and mitigation, are actively permitting the destruction of wetlands in
the western Everglades-Big Cypress. Between 1998 and 2002, the Corps permitted
more than 3,800 acres of wetlands to be drained in parts of the western Everglades for development. By the Corps’s own records,
it failed to deny a single permit application in the one million acre study area
of the western Everglades. In its Report, the
NWF contended that the two agencies are officially allowing the destruction of
wetlands in the western Everglades-Big Cypress the same way they allowed the
destruction of the eastern Everglades. Turns
out déjà vu is alive and well at the Corps and SFWMD.
Let’s put things on an objective basis with respect to
problems the Corps has had in south Florida.
Several nationally prominent research scientists have concluded that barriers
to true ecosystem restoration have arisen when institutions like the Corps
establish operating premises that are less than system-wide in scope. Take a
moment and think of how the Corps has intentionally compartmentalized flood
control, water management, and ecological values. By compartmentalize I mean
they treat those three elements as if they were absolutely separate, unrelated,
and distinct. Elements that are compartmentalized are by definition isolated
from each other and are not allowed to interact. That’s great except when you’re
dealing with natural systems in which water flow, quality, periodicity, and
quality are all tied together in the creation and sustenance of a unified but
fragile ecosystem.
Here’s another wonderful example of compartmentalism hard at
work at the Corps and the SFWMD: “Dr. David Rudnick, a senior scientist with
the South Florida Water Management District, which helps coordinate the Everglades restoration effort, said researchers are still
studying nitrogen’s effects. Because the project [CERP] concentrates on the Everglades, officials pay less attention to the marine
environment, and therefore less attention to nitrogen.” Sure, that’ll work. At
least until all the coral and bottom grasses in Biscayne
Bay National Park and
Florida Bay have died off. That’s when the dazed
and befuddled engineers at the Corps and SFWMD would finally tumble to the fact
that something’s dreadfully wrong. Why don’t we take a page from the Corps’s
book and wait until all the south and central Florida ecosystems are dying and it’s too
late to act. The big advantage of that tactic is that after it’s too late all
those pesky environmentalists won’t have anything to bitch and piss and moan
about. Now that is really something to think about.
That specific problem, when coupled with the Corps’s
demonstrated difficulty in learning from experience or from new information,
makes the barriers to restoration that much more difficult to overcome. You
should really read that NWF report, Road
to Ruin. It will make you angry and sad at the same time.
Let’s stand this situation on its head and hear the straight
skinny from the mouths of the guys who are charged with making the CERP happen:
the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The primary and
overarching purpose of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan [CERP] is
to restore the south Florida ecosystem, which
includes the Everglades. This purpose has
guided all aspects of the Plan’s development and proposed implementation. It is
a framework and guide to restore, protect, and preserve the water resources of
the greater Everglades ecosystem. The Plan has
been described as the world’s largest ecosystem restoration effort, and
includes restoring natural flows of water, water quality, and more natural
hydro-periods within the remaining natural areas. The Plan is intended to
result in a sustainable south Florida
by restoring the ecosystem, ensuring clean and reliable water supplies and
providing flood protection.
Okay, brave words those. But how many people familiar with
the hellaciously complex challenges posed by “fixing” the disaster the Corps
built over the past many decades truly believe that those lofty goals of
sustainability are achievable? My honest guess? Zero. Flat out, dead-ass zero.
Fact is, none of the real movers and shakers in Florida
and Washington
give a wood rat’s ass one way or the other as long as the water and the money
keep flowing. In their direction. Guaranteeing their stay in Fat City.
Perhaps skeptics need a few specific cases that illustrate
the Corps’s standard operating procedures in terms of the environment.
Procedures that have made people like me harsh critics. Here’s an example from
the heart of the Mid-West that made national headline news for two years
running.
In 1993, Donald Sweeney, PhD, a highly-respected Senior
Regional Economist at the Corps of Engineers St. Louis District, was assigned
as the lead economist on a major benefit-cost analysis to determine the
economic feasibility of expanding seven locks on the Mississippi
and Illinois Rivers. Sweeney was appointed technical
manager of an economics work group for the Upper Mississippi River, Illinois
Waterway Navigation Feasibility Study that covered parts of five states along
the Mississippi River from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Cairo,
Illinois, and included up to a
potential $4 billion in waterway improvements. At that time, that specific
project was the second largest in Corps history.
During that period, Sweeney pioneered the development of an
innovative and sophisticated computer-oriented economic model named “ESSENCE.”
The purpose of the model was to enable accurate assessments of the project’s
relative benefits and costs. Later, after Sweeney’s work had been vilified, the
National Research Council evaluated Sweeney’s model and said that it was “a
major advance over previous economic models used by the Corps.”
After a five-year evaluation effort, Sweeney and his work
group concluded that pursuing the locks project was not in the nation’s best
economic interests. The data his group collected and analyzed showed that projected
economic benefits would not justify the locks project for at least another
three decades. If then. When he reported that and other negative conclusions to
his superiors, the Corps economic team Sweeney headed was disbanded and Sweeney
was removed from his managerial role. The new economic team that was assembled
included Sweeney in a strictly secondary and greatly reduced role as a lowly
economic advisor.
Over a year later, when it became clear that senior Army
Corps of Engineers officials and high ranking officers were intent upon
manipulating the results of the benefit-cost study until the locks project
appeared to be justified economically, Sweeney went public. He revealed details
and documents to various newspapers that first reported his story in mid-February
2000. He also filed an affidavit and supporting documents with the U.S. Office
of Special Counsel. Sweeney found the whistle and started blowing hard enough
to get the national attention he knew was necessary to focus the appropriate
spotlights on the project.
The Washington Post
then published a number of internal Corps e-mails that showed Corps military
and civilian officials had launched a campaign “to develop evidence or data to
support a defensible set of projects, announcing that if the economic data did
not “capture the need for navigation improvements, then we have to find some
other way to do it.” The Corps’s desperation to fabricate supportive economic
data for their pet projects can easily be explained. U.S. law stipulates that “Congress
will fund water resources projects only
if a project’s benefits exceed its costs” [Emphasis by the author]. If you
believe that the benefits of many water resources projects actually exceed the
costs, you also believe all whores have hearts of gold and are pursuing
Master’s degrees in Social Work or Psychology during the day. But, hey, it’s
the law and the Corps knew it.
In March 2000, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel determined
there was sufficient evidence that the Corps had “engaged in violations of law,
rule or regulation and a gross waste of taxpayers’ funds” and requested that
Secretary of Defense William Cohen conduct a thorough investigation into the
alleged wrongdoings. In May 2000, a report by an independent panel of
economists, commissioned by the Northeast-Midwest Institute, found that the
Corps’s economics for the project in question were highly flawed. Also in May
2000, Richard Manguno, Sweeney’s successor as head of the project’s economic
team, swore in an affidavit to Congressional investigators that senior Corps
officials had pressured him to manipulate the project’s benefit-cost analysis.
It was business as usual for the Corps, despite the intense national public
pressure to be honest. The Corps’s motto seems to be: Why tell the truth when a
plausible lie better serves our purpose? Why indeed? A question for the ages.
In October 2000, desperate to salvage their badly tarnished
reputation, the Corps of Engineers commissioned an independent study by two North Dakota State University
economists. Unfortunately for the Corps, the professors concluded that the
District’s second set of economists had used flawed methodology in their
benefit-cost analysis. The handwriting was on the wall for all to see. In
November 2000, the U.S. Army Inspector General substantiated Sweeney’s
allegations that Corps officials manipulated data to justify the project’s
multi-billion dollar price tag.
In early February 2001, a study by the National Academy of
Sciences also concluded that Donald Sweeney was correct about the initial
conclusions he reached in his benefit-cost analysis and, among other things,
recommended that future Corps studies be subject to independent technical
review. Which, in the academic world that prizes independence of thought, was a
vicious body blow and a face-slapping rejection of the Corps’s wide-eyed claims
of innocence. Talk about being caught in the spotlight with their fingers in
the cookie jar. Those guys were proved to be red-faced liars at every turn. And
it wasn’t just low-level grunts we’re talking about. Several Corps generals and
other high ranking Army staff were implicated in the scandal as the chief
instigators of the wrong-doing. Not much anyone could do to “explain away”
nasty problems like the ones Sweeney exposed. We’re talking about systemic
institutional failure. Failure to realize that truth and integrity take
precedence over political motivation. Don’t forget, we’re talking about the
United States Army here. Warriors who willingly volunteer to give their very
lives to protect the American way of life. Or to protect the right of Congress
to award pork to their biggest campaign contributors. Same thing, right? Or so
the Corps generals seemed to think.
Here’s another glaring example of blatant Corps chicanery
from the East Coast. The Chesapeake and Delaware Canal
flows across northern Maryland and Delaware, connecting the Delaware River estuary with the
Chesapeake Bay and the Port
of Baltimore. The C&D Canal is owned by the U.S. Department of
Defense and operated by the Army Corps of Engineers Philadelphia District.
Therefore the Corps engineers and hydrologists can’t possibly claim to be
unaware of the Canal’s physical characteristics. At its existing dredged depth
of thirty-five feet and fourteen miles in length, the C&D Canal
is an absolutely unremarkable water management project. Except for the fact
that, according to official Philadelphia District Corps documents, the Canal
flows in opposite directions simultaneously. That’s right, a canal that flows
uphill and downhill at the same time naturally. Courtesy of the U.S. Army Corps
of Engineers.
When Chesapeake
and Delaware Canal Company was established in 1802 the proposed route was
surveyed by the Corps of Engineers. In 1829, the original canal opened,
connecting Chesapeake City to Delaware
City, just north of the present
entrance at Reedy Point, Delaware. The canal was operated by a
private corporation until 1919 when it was bought by the Corps of Engineers.
From 1921 to 1927, the Corps widened it, removed all the locks and converted it
to a sea-level canal. The Chesapeake and Delaware Canal was set in its current
configuration approximately 33 years ago when the Corps dredged it to a depth
of 35 feet. Today, the C&D Canal is part of the Inter-coastal Waterway, the
world’s third busiest canal, and the oldest major commercial waterway in the U.S. still in
use.
In a study for the Port
of Baltimore on a $90 million proposal
to deepen the C&D Canal, the Corps supported that project and concluded
that the Canal’s net flow was west to east, which therefore would minimize the
proposed project’s ecological damage to the sensitive Chesapeake
Bay. But in another study for the Port of Philadelphia for a $311
million plan to deepen the Delaware River, the same Corps District concluded
the very same C&D Canal flowed east to west, thus minimizing ecological
damage to the Delaware River estuary. The Corps staff responsible for both
assessments were professional hydrologists and water resource engineers.
Obviously, a lack of technical expertise was not the problem. Those good old
boys were simply caught lying through their teeth. Can you say the two magic
words? Political pressure. And we all know how the Corps reacts to that, with
its peanut butter legs and non-existent ethical backbone.
That $90 million project to deepen the C&D
Canal from 35 feet to 40 feet was
authorized contingent on favorable Corps studies to improve a shortcut for
ocean-going vessels to the Port
of Baltimore. However,
the Corps’s own studies demonstrated that that project would neither increase
shipping nor create more jobs. Then, an independent review panel determined
that deepening could not be justified economically since justification of the
previous canal deepening had been projected based on major increases in ship traffic.
But ship traffic had actually declined to less
than 15 percent of the projected levels. Hey, hard economic facts make no
difference to the Corps. They’re simply another problem to be whisked under the
rug.
The sad problem is that there are plenty more examples like
those above that clearly illustrate where the Corps’s heart is. In concluding
this little demonstration, for further enlightenment we turn to the Corps
itself and listen as their mouthpiece speaks. “We know there will be rocks and
shoals along the way,” John Fumero, the Jacksonville District’s General Counsel
said of the CERP. “People are going to have to trust us to do the right thing.”
Is anyone out there rolling over, helpless with laughter? Or maybe simply flat
out hysterical? Trust the Corps? Is he out of his mind?
After decades of presenting bald-faced prevarications to the
American public about the damage they were doing to one environment after
another, after decades of bending over for the moneyed interests that fund
congressional campaigns, what possible reason is there to trust the Corps of
Engineers about anything? After decades of misplaced confidence and misplaced
hope, only canonized saints or venal congressmen trust the Corps. And without
independent scientific verification only fools, wide-eyed innocents, the
totally inexperienced, or greed-monger powerbrokers believe one word the Corps
says about the environment. By the way, you should remember that guy’s name.
John Fumero. Sounds like that good old boy has a very bright future with the Florida’s fat cats. Very
bright indeed.
