Wayne Huber, shown in front of an aerial photo of an Everglades conservation area, heads a National Research Council committee that will report to Congress on technical progress in rescuing Florida’s Everglades ecosystem.

Turning the Tide in the Everglades

By Rhonda Hillbery

When Wayne Huber ’63 was a little boy, one of his favorite pastimes involved turning on the backyard garden hose and seeing what happened. As he grew older his water projects grew more complicated, and eventually he became a professor of water resources engineering at Oregon State University.

Now this self-described “wet civil engineer” finds himself overseeing a high-level review of the most ambitious environmental fix-it project ever undertaken in the United States—one in which water plays the leading role. As chair of a National Academy of Sciences committee charged with reviewing progress in the restoration of the Everglades, he’ll draw on skills honed over his 40-year career.

Approved by Congress in 2000, the $10.5 billion, 40-year Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (otherwise known as CERP, rhymes with slurp) to rescue south Florida’s expansive and endangered wetlands is by all measures large—in budget, magnitude, and complexity. The federal government and the state of Florida are sharing the hefty costs 50-50.

Much larger than Everglades National Park proper, the greater Everglades ecosystem extends south from the Kissimmee River watershed to Lake Okeechobee, through the Everglades, and on to the waters of Florida Bay and the coral reefs.

Correcting decades of mismanagement in the Everglades, an enormous mosaic of marshes and sloughs interspersed with forests of cypress and mangrove, is of more than local interest. “Everglades restoration is important for the whole country, because the Everglades themselves are a unique national treasure,” Huber says. Without the rescue plan, “the Everglades will continue to deteriorate, and with it the Everglades will move toward a more natural state. At some point you can come to the point of no return, so the sooner we start addressing that, the better off we’ll be.”

Overall, the strategy earns high marks from Huber. “The genius of the CERP plan is that it has the involvement of virtually every interest in Florida,” he says. The divergent interests include those of housing developers and municipalities, owners of vast expanses of sugarcane fields, and environmental advocates such as the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club. All of these stakeholders, and many more, influenced the restoration vision. The technical details were formulated over six years by hundreds of scientists and engineers who work for 30 agencies, led by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the South Florida Water Management District.

The project turns on its head more than a century of water policy in Florida, where miles of canals and ditches have systematically starved the Everglade’s once-thriving watery ecosystem. In simple terms, CERP sets out to capture and store the water now discarded daily through a maze of channels and canals that flow into the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. This is the same water that left to its natural cycles rose and fell seasonally. Before it was disrupted, the Everglades ecosystem acted as a giant sponge capable of holding vast stores of water, sustaining hundreds of plant and animal species.

Under CERP, the thirsty Everglades will now step to the head of the line for Florida’s water rights. The initiative reverses a decades-old practice of dumping 1.7 billion gallons of fresh water daily into the sea, instead capturing 80 percent of it in reservoirs and wells to be returned to the ecosystem. The remaining 20 percent is slated for supporting agriculture and bordering urban areas in the rapidly growing state.

In large part, the blueprint uses technology to accomplish what nature, left to its own devices, once did naturally. “The natural system mastered the process,” Huber explains. “It put the water where it was supposed to go. Historically, the water would be stored in Lake Okeechobee, then every five or six years it would overflow into the Everglades. We don’t get those big outflows into the Everglades anymore.”

“Getting the water right,” a CERP slogan, relies on about 68 individual projects, all designed to deliver water, in the proper quantities and quality, to the right places at the right times. “The key is in storing and releasing the water,” Huber says, adding that what sounds simple is not. The “very technologically sophisticated and complex plan” was devised by hundreds of engineers, with input from scientists from federal and state agencies and universities, as well as environmentalists.

An equally important component is buying private land and returning it to the Everglades ecosystem. The state of Florida has targeted nearly 500,000 acres for purchase, an expenditure expected to cost as much as $2.77 billion. More than half that acreage has already been purchased, but land prices are rising rapidly as population growth pushes demand for housing.

Despite all the planning, time, and effort expended to date, most of the actual work has yet to begin, underscoring the extraordinary degree of technical coordination and political compromise involved.

Setting a Course

In his role as committee chair, Huber leads a National Research Council panel whose task is to “evaluate progress” on the 40-year Everglades plan. A division of the National Academies, the NRC advises the federal government on scientific and technical issues.

Huber was offered the job in 2004, when NRC staff asked him to lead the first congressional review of CERP and to oversee the preparation and writing of a report to be presented to Congress in June. This 12-member Committee on Independent Scientific Review of Everglades Restoration Progress is packed with a range of experts, including biologists, ornithologists, ecologists, engineers, social scientists, and economists.

“We establish, if not a standard, a baseline or benchmark that other committees might follow,” Huber says. “We don’t have any precedents to guide us other than our own good judgment. Beyond that, the NRC staff are the ones doing huge amounts of work to keep all of us on the committee up to date.

Huber, third from right, and other members of the Committee on Independent Scientific Review of Everglades Restoration Progress, including biologists, ornithologists, ecologists, engineers, and other experts, head out for the wilds of the Everglades for field study.

“I am enormously impressed by my colleagues,” Huber adds. “Every one is an accomplished expert in their field. Most members have prior Everglades experience, so they are able to hit the ground running.”
The work group has met quarterly in Florida and other locations to review progress, receive briefings on scientific issues, and sometimes head out to the Everglades for field updates.

Work doesn’t end after Huber leads the presentation of the committee’s report to Congress in June. Future committees, filled with both new and returning members, will continue reporting every two years to Congress until 2040. By then, the massive fix-up effort is supposed to be complete.

That’s not to say salvaging the Everglades is a done deal. Says Shannon Estenoz, who until recently served as senior policy advisor for the World Wildlife Fund, “The hardest work is ahead of us. That’s why the work of the NRC committee is so incredibly important in this process. In some ways it’s the place where the technical questions will be most critically and thoughtfully evaluated.” (Estenoz now directs the Sun Coast Region of the National Parks Conservation Association.)

The public review will also serve to remind the nation that the work of rescuing the Everglades is only now beginning and faces a far from secure future, she adds.

Stephanie Johnson, an NRC senior program officer, says that Huber was tapped because of his extensive background in precisely the type of water engineering issues that are relevant to CERP. “Modeling is an integral part of the CERP, and Wayne has a good understanding of how these models work, and their limitations and benefits.” Johnson works closely with the committee and coordinates its public meetings.

An expert in urban hydrology and storm-water management, nonpoint-source pollution (that stemming primarily from runoff due to rainfall), and transport processes related to water quality, Huber has developed tools for urban storm-water management and control. He is one of the original authors of a storm-water management model that is widely used by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Although the NRC review is firmly focused on science, not advocacy, Huber doesn’t mind using the E word. “I try to embrace the environmental ethic in all the work I do. I like to engage in green engineering, which is a buzzword of the day, but the fact is that this type of engineering helps the environment, in particular the water environment.” Besides his technical experience, Johnson says, Huber has “a calm, thoughtful presence about him” that is helpful when he presides over sometimes contentious proceedings.

In his undergraduate days at the Institute, Huber was exposed to the burgeoning environmental-engineering science program on campus. “Caltech was doing the preeminent studies at the time. I have to thank Professor Norman Brooks, PhD ’54, for getting me involved and for letting me find out that you can work with water, play with it, and make money doing it.”

He was able to engage in river sediment transport modeling during a summer research program, supervised by Brooks (now the Irvine Professor of Environmental and Civil Engineering, Emeritus) and other faculty members. “It was taking Brooks’s class in fluid mechanics and working on some of those projects that helped me know I really wanted to work in that part of civil engineering.”

Huber went on to earn his PhD in civil engineering at MIT in 1968, and was a professor of environmental engineering sciences at the University of Florida during the 1970s and 1980s. Moving on to a professorship at Oregon State University starting in 1991, he also headed OSU’s department of civil construction and environmental engineering for nine years until 2000.

Rescuing the Everglades

Florida’s mammoth Everglades ecosystem extends more than 200 miles south from the city of Orlando, through Everglades National Park, to the coastline southwest of Miami. Natural springs and seasonal rains helped fill the lakes and creeks to the north, and the water flowed into the Kissimmee River before it emptied into Lake Okeechobee, which then supplied small streams at the south end of the lake. Much of the runoff continued as sheet flow, a broad front of water moving at a shallow, uniform depth, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico and Florida Bay. Throughout much of its history, native sawgrass carpeted this portion of the Everglades, growing so thickly in some places that the underlying water was barely visible.

This 18,000-square-mile ecosystem formed a wetlands area twice the size of the state of New Hampshire. Environmentalist Marjorie Stoneman Douglas dubbed it the River of Grass in her classic book of the same name, published in 1947. Its bountiful and slow-moving water helped nourish sawgrass ridges, sloughs, and tree islands favored by alligators, numerous bird and waterfowl species, and multitudes of other subtropical wildlife.

The great egret is one of the many Everglades birds and animals whose habitat has been diminished by practices that drained wetlands and carried millions of gallons of water out to sea, halving the ecosystem’s acreage over time.

That was before the encroaching forces of 20th-century urbanization and agriculture took their toll. Human ingenuity devised a vast network of levees and canals to carry now-unwanted water out to sea, allowing a large sugarcane industry to flourish. As waterways were rerouted to prevent flooding, swamps were drained to make way for homes. By the 1950s, the Everglades acreage had been halved and the ecosystem’s natural food chain broken. Today, close to 70 species of native plants and animals are endangered or hovering on the edge of extinction. Among the most endangered is the Florida panther, whose numbers have fallen to less than 50 in the wild. Wood storks, ibises, roseate spoonbills, great white and tricolored herons, and egrets—all wading birds that have come to symbolize the Everglades—have experienced severe population declines, but some have been successful in migrating to wetland preserves in neighboring states.

A Fragile Alliance

After the environmental movement gained traction in the 1960s, the degradation of the Everglades became a prime focus for conservationists. But it took decades before intention led to action. During the 1990s, a wide-ranging coalition of interests finally hammered out a consensus on how to reverse the damage.

“It was a fragile alliance but they all got together and agreed that something needed to be done,” says Estenoz.

The landmark Everglades Restoration Act, signed by President Clinton in December 2000, authorized $1.4 billion in initial federal spending. Two years later, President George W. Bush signed a second agreement with his brother, Florida governor Jeb Bush. This was meant to underscore the federal commitment to ensure adequate water for the Everglades, even if it conflicted with other needs, from irrigation to flood control.

Along with returning as much land as possible to its native marsh state, at the heart of CERP is an extensive network of aquifers and underground wells. More than 300 of them will be drilled to create an aquifer storage and recovery (ASR) system in south Florida. At the rate of up to 1.5 billion gallons of water a day, the water will be collected and pumped out as needed to sustain the Everglades.

Among the many questions surrounding the ASR system is the technology itself, Huber says. The critical ASR component is “fascinating technology,” but has only been tested on a small scale. It is unclear, he says, how such large-scale storage will affect water quality, if the water can be pumped out effectively, and whether the aquifers will be vulnerable to cracking.

CERP has a plan for that too—unforeseen or unwanted outcomes will be addressed by using “adaptive management,” in other words, by assessing and modifying the technology as the plan unfolds.

Given the environmental, agricultural, and development interests that must all draw from the Everglades’ limited water supply, will it be possible to fulfill the needs of all three? That’s one of the biggest questions posed by the restoration plan, Huber says. “If there isn’t enough water for everyone, then who’s going to get it?”

One thing is clear: despite an initial willingness to compromise, competing interests may not ultimately agree on what a “successful” restoration should look like. Environmentalists and conservationists would naturally like to restore as much natural habitat as possible. Others see plenty of potential for balancing ecological concerns while maintaining abundant crop production, flood control systems, and water supplies for a growing population.

Most of Florida’s sugarcane, citrus, and winter vegetables are grown in a large farming area south of Lake Okeechobee. A trade association for the politically powerful sugarcane industry notes that Everglades restoration plans are largely “based on untested technology that relies on pilot projects to determine their effectiveness.”

Nevertheless, the association supports the overall concept. “The beauty of CERP is that it plans for the water-related needs of the region for the next 50 years in a way that doesn’t pit one user group—the environment or natural system, agriculture or urban—against another,” says Jeff Ward, vice president of legal affairs for the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida. “Unfortunately, federal appropriations have been slow in coming, especially for the aquifer storage and recovery pilots.” Other key components of the planning and analysis are lagging, he adds.

Most parties seem to agree on one thing: no amount of intervention will restore the Everglades to its original pristine condition. “The problem is that 125 years of drainage in south Florida has irreversibly altered the natural system, primarily by reducing its size and what is on its boundaries,” says Huber. “The goal of CERP is to restore the remaining natural system so that it resembles the historic, undisturbed ecosystem as much as possible. And the key to that is ‘getting the water right.’ ”

Meanwhile, the state of Florida has accelerated its pace of land acquisition for Everglades restoration. But with land prices in the state rising at a frantic pace, the dollars aren’t stretching as far as was originally hoped.

Indeed, money is probably the biggest stumbling block facing the Everglades rescue. Many of the elements that make up CERP must be funded incrementally by Congress. There’s always a risk that the funding will be jeopardized by shifts in the political climate, the economy, and national priorities. “While the technical challenges are huge, at the end of the day it’s really politics and money that will make or break Everglades restoration,” says Estenoz.

The immense devastation that hurricanes Katrina and Rita wreaked on the Gulf Coast and Florida in 2005 is taxing already overburdened federal resources. How and whether these strains will affect CERP remains unclear, especially given its nearly four-decade time frame.

Continued public support and interest are likely to be crucial, Estenoz says, but adds, “It’s difficult to keep national attention focused on a long-term project like the Everglades. People’s memories are short, and there’s always a tendency to view congressional legislation as the end, rather than the beginning of a long and complex political process. The technical challenges are all playing out against the backdrop of an overarching politically charged atmosphere.”

Huber says that while the Everglades restoration project is far from perfect, it probably represents the nation’s best shot at saving an irreplaceable ecological treasure. He views the job of the committee as that of providing the clear-headed, even-handed review that scientists always hope will carry the day, reassuring the nation’s lawmakers and the public that the more than $10 billion being spent to save a giant wetlands is being used wisely.