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What Florida Bay needed was a good hurricane. This great blue outback of Everglades National Park was hiding a slow-motion environmental catastrophe, the area known locally as the Dead Zone. Stinking muck from dead and dying sea grass blanketed thousands of acres of once lucrative shrimp and lobster breeding grounds. This summer, plumes of algae spread for miles across waters once so clear you could read a newspaper on the bottom. Whole sponge beds died. Banks of mangroves stood gray and lifeless. It had been decades since a major hurricane had flushed out the bay, churning its stagnant water and pelting it with cleansing rain. But while the 160-mile-per-hour hit-and-run named Andrew trashed the nearby Everglades, it passed too quickly, too far to the north, and dropped too little rain to have much effect on Florida Bay. So now, and still, "Florida Bay is falling apart," says marine biologist Jay Zieman of the University of Virginia.
The bay's basic problem is obvious: up to 90 percent of the fresh water that once flowed to it from Lake Okeechobee through the Everglades has been diverted into the drainage canals and levees (map) that turned the alligator swamps of south Florida into prime real estate. But that's been true for decades. Why this year's sudden collapse? High water temperatures and salinity, excess nutrients from fertilizer runoff or a mysterious slime mold may have killed the sea grass and turned the algae into a real-life Blob. Or it may be part of some uncharted natural cycle.
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The National Park Service hasn't exactly scrambled to solve the mystery. Although Director James Ridenour calls the Everglades "the most threatened" park, its $1.6 million annual research budget has not budged since 1978. Half of the Everglades' 72 research slots are vacant for lack of funding. Trees sprout through the floor of the rotting trailer at its Key Largo field station; rats chew sea-grass samples and ransack equipment boxes. "There's been a paralysis in the Park Service regarding the bay," says Brian LaPointe of Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution in Ft. Pierce, Fla. Not only the usual green suspects are irate. Commercial fishermen say lobster, shrimp and stonecrab harvests worth $250 million annually are being destroyed; guides worry that sportsmen will take their rods-and their $500-a-day bonefish outings--elsewhere.
The prescription for Florida Bay is clear but costly. Proposals to restore significant flows of fresh water through the Everglades start at around $1 billion. But the cost of doing nothing could be even higher. Spillover from the bay may be killing delicate coral reefs in the tourist-packed Florida Keys to the south. Congress this summer authorized a five-year, $9 million program to protect water quality in the Keys National Marine Sanctuary. At least it's a down payment.
A dozen years ago VP George Bush was enjoying some quiet bonefishing on Florida Bay. "He looked at that water; it was crystal clear," says guide George Hommell, who still poles the flat-bottomed skiff when Bush vacations in the Keys. "He said, 'We've got to keep it this way, protect this, for our children and grandchildren'." We didn't. Maybe the next hurricane will.
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