Has One Florida Dam's Day Finally Come?

Photograph by Carlton Ward Jr.
Photograph by John Moran
Photograph by Erin Condon

Has One Florida Dam's Day Finally Come?

Conservationists have waged a 41-year battle to free “the sweetest water-lane in the world” by tearing down an unnecessary dam. Their efforts have seemed hopeless—until now.

By Ted Williams
Published: July-August 2012

Last April I journeyed to Florida to inspect America’s most unique dam and its influence on one of America’s most unique waterways. Rodman Dam on the Ocklawaha River is the only dam in the nation without even an alleged purpose. It is a 44-year-old vestigial appendage of what, in the words of Carl Buchheister, Audubon’s president from 1959 to 1967, would have been “one of the greatest boondoggles ever perpetrated.” 

Rodman was the only one of three planned dams that was completed and closed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as part of a canal to bisect Florida. The canal was designed for ships when work got under way in 1935, but funding quickly ran out. By the time work started again in 1964, the project had been scaled down to accommodate only barges. There would be vast impoundments connected by excavated channels and accessed by five locks.

The 182-mile Cross-Florida Barge Canal would have run from Jacksonville south and upstream on the St. Johns River (to be dredged), overland to the Ocklawaha (to be dredged and impounded) to a point near Silver Springs (thus destroying most of the Silver River), then overland again to the Withlacoochee River (to be channelized, dredged, and impounded) and on to Yankeetown and the Gulf of Mexico. 

In 1971, with the project almost a third complete, President Nixon killed it, rendering the Cross-Florida Barge Canal the biggest unfinished public works project in history. So today Rodman Dam just sits there, ruining terrestrial and aquatic habitat and blocking fish and wildlife movement. 

But never have prospects for restoring the Ocklawaha and its floodplain been brighter. America is easing away from the notion that dams are sacred monuments to be preserved in perpetuity. In the past decade they have been coming down all across the nation—Elwha and Glines Canyon dams in Washington; Birch Run and West Leechburg dams in Pennsylvania; Marmot, Condit, and Savage Rapids dams in Oregon; Sturgeon River Dam in Michigan; and LaSalle Dam in New York, to mention just a few.

And now, in response to a 60-day notice of intent to sue filed by Florida Defenders of the Environment (FDE) and the Florida Wildlife Federation in February, the U.S. Forest Service—custodian of land, water, fish, and wildlife compromised by the dam—has agreed to reassess damage to endangered species. Removing or breaching the dam is the only way to fix that damage. Pending Forest Service action, the suit is on hold.

 

America doesn’t have another river quite like the Ocklawaha. Rising from swamps and lakes in north-central Florida, it winds north along the western edge of the Ocala National Forest, then veers east at Orange Springs, where it’s collected by the St. Johns River. Fed by clear springs gushing from a water-rich feature called the Floridan Aquifer, it is semitropical, canopied, ancient. And unlike most other Florida rivers, almost all of them its junior, its course was set by a fault line raised by primordial earthquakes. It drains 2,800 square miles, much of it sanctuary for unique plants and animals, including the Florida scrub jay, that survived on this high ground when the rest of the peninsula was under the sea.

Eighteenth-century naturalist William Bartram’s description of the Ocklawaha was the inspiration for “Alph, the sacred river” in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan.” And a decade after the Civil War, poet Sidney Lanier, who explored the Ocklawaha by steamboat, described it as “the sweetest water-lane in the world, a lane which runs for more than a hundred and fifty miles of pure delight betwixt hedgerows of oaks and cypresses and palms and bays and magnolias and mosses and manifold vine-growths.”

It remains basically unchanged on April 9, 2012, at least where our party meets it on this windless morning fragrant with forest-fire smoke. We access it from the Silver River, a third of the way down the Ocklawaha’s northern course. In my canoe is FDE director Erin Condon. In two other canoes are FDE board president Steve Robitaille—an English professor and Emmy Award–winning filmmaker preparing a documentary on the watershed and its history; longtime Ocklawaha advocate and former Putnam County Environmental Council president Karen Ahlers; Charles Lee, director of advocacy for Audubon of Florida; and our professional guide, Lars Andersen, an accomplished birder, local historian, and author.

Sunlight, muted by the smoke, filters through overhead branches festooned with Spanish moss. Some of the more dominant trees in this rich, diverse bottomland forest are bald cypress, tupelo, sweet gum, red maple, swamp bay, cabbage palm, river elm, water hickory, green ash, and pumpkin ash. 

After a decade of drought almost all the flow comes from the Silver River, fed by the clear water of Silver Springs. So natural tannin is even more suppressed than usual. I can count the dorsal spines on largemouth bass 10 feet down. Clouds of juvenile and adult sunfish, mostly bluegills and redbreasts, hang and turn in the gentle current as if from a mobile. Florida gar, bowfins, catfish, and golden shiners ghost through and over waving eelgrass and carpets of coontail. Atlantic needlefish, iridescent green and silver, shoot across the surface. In still backwaters chain pickerel lie in ambush.

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Ted Williams

Ted Williams is freelance writer.

Type: Author | From: Audubon Magazine

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4-12-13 One Year Anniversary: USDA/USFS letter to Earthjustice

12 April 2013 ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY of letter from Jay McWhirter of U.S. Department of Agriculture (for USFS) to David Guest of Earthjustice at:
http://static-lobbytools.s3.amazonaws.com/press/20120417_letter_from_for...

USDA/USFS:
"On behalf of the Forest Service and the United States Department of Agriculture, I would like to inform you that the Forest Service has decided to reinitiate consultation with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service to address any issues to Federally-listed species regarding the Record of Decision for the Final Environmental Impact Statement for Occupancy and Use of the National Forest Land and Ocklawaha River Restoration, National Forests in Florida, Ocala National Forest, Marion and Lake Counties."

Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission:
"Federal agencies project that the consultation process could take up to two years to complete."
http://myfwc.com/fishing/freshwater/black-bass/first-year-updates/rodman/

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In an article recently Ed

In an article recently Ed Taylor said over 385,000 went to Rodman 2010/2011.

I asked about the numbers and this is what I got from Mickey Thomason. FY 10/11
Visitor Counts

Eureka East 18601.00
Eureka West 30169.00
Orange Springs BR 21807.00
Buckman Visitor Center 5241.00
Rodman Rec Area(E) 37341.00
Rodman Rec Area(W) 28278.00
Rodman Campground 14149.00
Rodman Rd East Side 71683.00
Rodman Rd West Side 38370.00
Hog Valley 17789.00
Kenwood Road 20658.00
St Johns Trail Lp South 4040.00

Ed Taylor tries to make it sound like everybody is coming to the reservoir/pool/lake, whatever it is now and that is not true. Not very many people put in at the Kenwood ramp and they really don't catch much when they do. I know because I go over there and ask them on occasion and they are usually pretty mopey about not catching anything. Mickey told me Taylor got the number wrong by about 80,000 (he added 80,000). I asked Mickey if more people go to Kenwood during the drawdown and he said "Yeah a lot more people go out there then, than when the water is up".
The last time I was at the Kenwood ramp a couple of months ago I saw Taylor there and he told me the canal was blocked by hydrilla toward the locks (you could see it from the bridge) and I told him it was blocked just upstream from the Kenwood ramp too. He asked me if I saw any dead fish out on the lake and that he was concerned that there would be a fish kill. How are the manatees supposed to get through that blockage after being let through the locks? The boats can't get through it. What good is it doing to keep it that way? This was just a couple of months after the water was back up after the drawdown to get rid of the hydrilla. They can spray it with herbicide to open up the channel then all of that dead stuff settles to the bottom. It is so nasty. I would never eat a fish caught out of that stagnant pool. I drove over to the public docks after I talked to Taylor that day and there were dozens of dead catfish floating belly up downstream of the dam. People were fishing in that mess and pulling up Bluegill, etc. through the dead catfish and they were taking them home to eat. Yuck.

Evapotranspiration Water Losses of Rodman Reservoir

The late Marjorie Harris Carr, for whom the Cross Florida Greenway is named after, often argued that Lake Ocklawaha should never be referred to as Rodman RESERVOIR "because it did not conserve water." She said, "Indeed, due to evaporation, Rodman Pool loses water from the [Ocklawaha/St. Johns] river system."

"Ocklawahaman" tends to agree with that heroic lady about the 9,200 to 13,000-acre impoundment behind Rodman Dam which causes 21 miles of the mainstream Ocklawaha River to be over-exposed for no legitimate reason to 3 massive evapotranspiration powers: (1) hot Florida sunshine (2) wind & (3) runaway exotic aquatic plant growth. Rodman was designed & built by the US Army Corps of Engineers in the 1960’s for the sole purpose of being a "barge navigation pool" for the defunct (since the 1970’s) Cross Florida Barge Canal project.

Ronald L. Hanson (1991) of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) defined evapotranspiration as: "Evapotranspiration is the water lost to the atmosphere by two processes-evaporation and transpiration. Evaporation is the loss from open bodies of water, such as lakes and reservoirs, wetlands, bare soil, and snow cover; transpiration is the loss from living-plant surfaces."

http://geochange.er.usgs.gov/sw/changes/natural/et/

Excerpted from "U.S. Geological Survey Water-Supply Paper 2300" (1984) "FLORIDA Surface-Water Resources" pages 187-188:
http://books.google.com/books?id=9-ZCGdqvy-4C&pg=PA187&lpg=PA187&dq=%22A...

"A large percentage of the rainfall (60 to 88 percent) is lost to evapotranspiration. Annual evaporation from free-water surfaces ranges from 48 inches in the southeast to about 42 inches in the northwest (Farnsworth and others, 1982)."

"Evaporation from Lake Oklawaha [sic] and diversions through Buckman Lock have contributed to the downward trend in average discharge by water year for the Oklawaha River..."
https://sites.google.com/site/ocklawahaman/evapo-transpiration-water-los...

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