Why Eco Groups Oppose "Alligator Alcatraz"
An Attack On Florida's Everglades Risks Polluting Sensitive Waters.
“The Everglades lacks the obvious drama of some of our most famous natural treasures, such as the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, or Yosemite,” writes American poet Campbell McGrath. “It is a more meditative space, a place to lose oneself amid clouds and sawgrass, rather than find oneself dazzled and amazed at earth’s grandeur. It is also, unlike those luckier parks, located in the backyard of a major American city, subject to the relentless pressure of real estate development that fuels Florida’s economy.”
It’s the largest remaining subtropical wilderness left in North America. The Everglades, also known as a “river of grass,” is home to more than 80 endangered species of plants and animals including the Florida panther.
It’s also a drinking water source for 9 million Floridians.
I visited the area back in 2018 and witnessed the devastation caused by decades of bad water management policy and sugar barons. I toured Lake Okeechobee, getting an up close and personal look at the heart of South Florida’s ecosystem.
For more about what’s fueling the harmful algal blooms (habs) that cause serious environmental and public health issues, read more here.
No environmental review. No period for public comments.
If you’ve been watching the news this week, you may have heard about “Alligator Alcatraz.” The nickname speaks to the swampy inhabitants of this region and the former isolated maximum-security prison island in San Francisco Bay.
This new, makeshift immigration detention center is located in the heart of the Florida Everglades. The 39-acre site is at the remote and abandoned Miami-Dade Collier Training and Transition Airport, which has an unused airstrip.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said he used emergency powers to take over the land from the county.
Last week, Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity sued in U.S. District Court to protect the Everglades from this detention center.
The suit was filed against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Florida Division of Emergency Management, and Miami-Dade County.
The plan has gone through no environmental review as required under federal law, and the public has had no opportunity to comment, according to the lawsuit.
“The site is more than 96 percent wetlands, surrounded by Big Cypress National Preserve.” Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades said in a statement. “This scheme is not only cruel, it threatens the Everglades ecosystem that state and federal taxpayers have spent billions to protect.
She also noted that Friends of the Everglades was founded by Marjory Stoneman Douglas in 1969 to stop harmful development at this very location and now more than 50 years later, the threat has returned, posing another existential threat to the Everglades.
The Everglades Foundation, which works to restore and protect this area through science, advocacy and education, also opposes the construction of the temporary facility.
“We are communicating with the state on an impact strategy to protect the natural areas from new pollutants introduced because of increased human activities on and around the site,” Jacquie Weisblum, vice president of communications for the org said in a statement.
The foundation has recommended Camp Blanding and Homestead Air Reserve Base as alternative sites due to their less sensitive locations, enhanced security, and existing infrastructure beyond a tarmac.
“This massive detention center will blight one of the most iconic ecosystems in the world,” Elise Bennett, Florida and Caribbean director and attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity said in a statement. “This reckless attack on the Everglades—the lifeblood of Florida — risks polluting sensitive waters and turning more endangered Florida panthers into roadkill. It makes no sense to build what’s essentially a new development in the Everglades for any reason, but this reason is particularly despicable.”
The Everglades is the largest mangrove ecosystem in the Western Hemisphere, the largest continuous stand of sawgrass prairie and the most significant breeding ground for wading birds in North America. In 2010, it was designated as an endangered UNESCO World Heritage site.
“This plan has had none of the environmental review that’s required by federal law,” Tania Galloni, managing attorney for the Florida office of Earthjustice said in a statement. “Cruelty aside, it defies common sense to put a mass of people, vehicles, and development in one of the most significant wetlands in the world. That’s why we’re going to court.”
“Draining The Swamp”
When we talk about any kind of development in the Everglades, the heart of the issue always comes down to draining a swamp.
This large, interconnected marshland ecosystem once spanned some 4,000 square miles, and now is less than half that area. The region was one of the most biodiverse areas in our country, rich with exceptional flora and fauna, but the “swampland” has always been considered a nuisance to development.
Michael Grunwald writes in his book, The Swamp:
“Americans believed it was their destiny to drain this ‘God- forsaken’ swamp, to ‘reclaim’ it from mosquitoes and rattlesnakes, to ‘improve’ it into a subtropical paradise of bountiful crops and blooming communities. Wetlands were considered wastelands and ‘draining the swamp’ was a metaphor for festering problems.”
Starting in the 19th century, both politicians and business leaders schemed how to turn the wetlands into something productive. They discovered that if they drained the water, they could transform the land into the perfect spot for sugarcane fields.
In fact, the region became one of the largest areas of rich, fertile soil in the country, now home to hundreds of thousands of acres of sugarcane crops. Other developments followed and population boomed.
Today, we are dealing with the effects of re-routing nature’s waterways and losing an ecosystem that acted as a natural water treatment system helping to filter waste and purify the water.
The Everglades begin far north of Lake Okeechobee, one of the largest natural freshwater lakes in the country, in the Kissimmee River Basin. This great watershed once traveled the Kissimmee River through creeks and tributaries to the lake, which then passed into the Florida Bay.
Underlying the river of complex grasses is porous limestone that captures massive amounts of fresh water supplying scores of lakes, springs, and marsh systems. The Kissimmee River was an important component of the Florida Everglades until it was cut off by the Army Corps of Engineers in an attempt to manage Florida’s fresh water for agriculture, industrial, and residential development.
More than 100 miles of winding river and tributaries that flowed gradually down the spine of the state to Lake Okeechobee got converted into a massive manually controlled canal, a 56-mile channel directly to Lake Okeechobee, a massive sewer of wastewater discharges that would have otherwise been cleaned of most nutrients in the natural grasses of the meandering river.
Congress passed the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) in 2000, as a way to “restore, preserve, and protect the south Florida ecosystem while providing for other water-related needs of the region, including water supply and flood protection.”
It’s the largest hydrologic restoration project ever attempted in our country, but the project has wobbled from both lack of funding and political backing. For years, both Republicans and Democrats running in Florida have promised to fix the state’s water problems and reallocate more resources to projects like CERP.
Originally, CERP included more than 50 projects to be completed in 30 years at a cost of $8.2 billion.
The most recent report to Congress projected CERP would take approximately 50 years from its authorization to implement at a total cost of $23.2 billion due to inflation, changes in project scope and schedule, and new project authorizations.
Through fiscal year 2024, the federal government has spent $3.2 billion, and the State of Florida has spent $2.8 billion on CERP construction projects, according to cost-share transparency reporting.
Speaking of funding… U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said “Alligator Alcatraz” will be largely funded by FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program.
Information about that program is no longer available on FEMA’s website, but a DHS spokesperson told PolitiFact that FEMA has roughly $625 million in that program’s funds that can be allocated to build the facility.
Gov. DeSantis’s office told PolitiFact the facility will use temporary buildings and shelters similar to those used during natural disasters.
The DHS spokesperson also said that Florida initially will pay for the facility and then will submit a reimbursement request to FEMA and DHS.
DHS said the facility’s total cost will be about $450 million for one year. It’s expected to open 30 to 60 days after construction, which started June 23, according to The New York Times. It will open with 500 to 1,000 beds and is expected to have 5,000 beds by early July.
Images from earlier today, show that the facility is already flooding from some light rain in the area.
What happens when a hurricane hits? What about the impact of the thousands of people working and detained there? Where does the waste go?
Lots of questions remain with a lot of potential for harm in a highly sensitive area.
Imagine if we could fix a levee or get clean drinking water to communities at the rate at which this detention facility has come to fruition.
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This makes me sick to my stomach
There is a reason that the Trump administration doesn’t want the people to know anything about it