Right now, the Water Conservation Areas (WCAs), which are massive wetlands that help move water through the central Everglades and into Everglades National Park, are higher than they should be.
Water that needs to move south into Everglades National Park is hitting a bottleneck at Tamiami Trail highway, creating a high-water situation in the WCAs that’s bad for habitat, bad for the ecology, bad for the tree islands and the animals that depend on them, and bad for the communities that live in the area.
Recent improvements are conveying some water through the Tamiami Trail, and additional upgrades under construction will facilitate even more in the future.
But in the meantime, this situation is being made a lot worse by inequities in the system upstream, where operations in the Everglades Agricultural Area are throwing everything out of balance—operations that have become the status quo and a threat to the natural order year after year.
Find out exactly what’s exacerbating the situation in this video, where we show you firsthand how the preferential treatment of one entity is negatively impacting the rest of the stakeholders.
*NOTE: since the filming of this video, water levels in the WCAs have receded some, relieving some degree of the flooding. Also, the Army Corps of Engineers is currently working on acquiring approval for a “Planned Deviation” to their water operations that would allow them to further relieve the flooding through existing infrastructure.
