Celebrated finish of pump station to divert polluted water from Caloosahatchee to sit idle for now
A massive pump station to retrieve polluted water released from Lake Okeechobee into the headwaters of the Caloosahatchee River is completed — now it will sit idle.
The station was designed to retrieve polluted water just released from Lake Okeechobee into the artificial headwaters of the Caloosahatchee River, then divert it to an 18-square-mile reservoir, has been completed in Hendry County.
It will sit idle for at least a year before the side-by-side-by-side pumps inside a concrete building start siphoning off up to 650,000 gallons per minute of lake water into the Caloosahatchee Reservoir, which is capable of holding 55 billion gallons.
The hope is the water from Lake Okeechobee, polluted with nutrients from large-scale agriculture operations to its north and often rife with blue-green algae, will be filtered by plants in the reservoir to reduce its levels of nitrogen and phosphorus before it's re-released into the fragile Caloosahatchee River watershed.
Higher-ups in the South Florida Water Management District joined federal, state, and local officials on-site in Hendry County recently to celebrate the completion of the pump station, which is one of the largest of its kind in the state.
“Southwest Florida knows how important our water quality is to our way of life, our estuary, and our local economy,” said Chauncey Goss, chairman of the South Florida Water Management District's governing board. “Once this reservoir comes online, there will be billions of gallons of water storage available that will protect the delicate balance of fresh and saltwater in the Caloosahatchee estuary.”
Because the reservoir is incomplete the pump station will sit idle until later in 2025 — if there are no delays in the complicated creation of a man-made wetland of such a large size.
Polluted water from Okeechobee released into the Caloosahatchee in recent years has been blamed for major downstream outbreaks of blue-green algae, and from time-to-time lesser water-quality problems affecting plants, animals, and recreation possibilities throughout the river’s watershed.
A century ago, self-appointed Everglades water management engineers like Hamilton Disston dredged the Caloosahatchee River, altering its flow forever by connecting it to Lake Okeechobee and upsetting the natural balance of when and where fresh and saltwater mix.