Once again, Curtis Martin, writing for the Miami Herald, has a timely and informative article. He did this last month as well. It’s articles like this one that make it hard for a blogger to avoid plagiarism: I simply can’t find enough fluff in the article to cut out. For example, here’s the lede:

A quick refresher on Lake Okeechobee’s annual water levels in recent years, starting in 2000: Too high. Way too low. Just right. Just right. Too high. Way too high. Too low. Way too low. That brings us to 2008, a year in which the lake has been way too low until three weeks ago, when Tropical Storm Fay put things right — if only for the moment.
Hurricane Ike or another storm could quickly push water too high again, potentially endangering the lake’s aging earthen levee. That’s why federal engineers began draining it last week.

Summarizing the article would only take away its punch. But, at the risk of boring you all to death, here’s a summary:

Rain falls into the Kissimmee River basin north of Lake Okeechobee faster than it can be pumped out. According to AoF’s Paul Gray, and the Army Corps, about six times faster. According to Curtis Martin’s article, every inch of rain that falls in the basin raises the lake about three inches. When Fay dumped 5 to 7 inches basinwide, well, even a slow-witted mathematician like me can see that it will raise the lake about 15 to 21 inches (nearly two feet) pretty darn quickly.

So, even though the lake is only just now reaching (actually, slightly exceeding) its historic average, the Corps and the SFWMD have finally realized what Audubon has been saying all along: the historic average is way too high. Not only is it damaging to the levees; it’s also bad for the environment. It’s bad for the fish, it’s bad for the birds, and it’s bad for business. So, to avoid the perils of high water in the lake, we’d rather risk the perils of low water. As Martin writes in Saturday’s column, the Corps and the SFWMD “control the floodgates, not the floods.”

So even though we’ve gotten a lot of rain, and the lake is as full as we want it to be, water restrictions are still in place, and still on track to become permanent. In one sense, it’s commonsense: why irrigate your lawn when we’re getting plenty of rain?