Fla. Water Management Officials Prepare for Hurricane Season

Florida water management officials have begun their annual drawdown of 17 lakes in the Kissimmee Basin, near Orlando, in anticipation of the upcoming hurricane season and are starting to put lessons into effect they learned last year into practice.

Bill Graf, a spokesman for the Tohopekaliga Water Management District said the drawdown of Lake Tohopekaliga last year to remove muck was perfectly times, since the additional storage capacity in the lakes system beyond its normal summer levels helped prevent significant flooding. The lake was four-and-a-half feet lower last August than it normally would have been.

“Had that not happened, flooding would have been more dramatic and widespread,” Graf told the Osceola News-Gazette. Several other lakes in the system also had to be lowered, some by three or more feet, creating significant additional storage capacity.

“During Hurricane Frances, city of Kissimmee officials were worried because the lake level was coming up into the waterfront park and then there was a two-and-a-half to three-foot storm surge,” Graf said. “With the combination, there would have been, at the least, water around the train station and Kissimmee Civic Center.”

When asked what the water district had learned from the 2004 hurricane season, Graf said it already is working with city of St. Cloud officials to enlarge drainage structures and that bringing in the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a partner for that work would result in a greater number of federal dollars for the project and fewer local ones.

The district also is developing better modeling and automated monitoring systems for Boggy, Reedy and Shingle creeks, all waterways with no flood control structures and yet with significant residential and commercial development along them.

He said the district also is working on improved modeling on predicting when the lakes would crest. He said that while public officials generally agree that it is better to provide a “worst case” prediction, more specific forecasts would help those same officials make better decisions about what areas, for example, should be evacuated.

At the height of the flood threat, the district moved the maximum amount of water possible through its drainage system, resulting in some damage to structures. According to Graf, all repairs to the system have been made. The issue, he said, was that the water released through the locks, in an effort to keep communities from flooding, exceeded design.

New residents often misunderstand the annual lowering of the lakes, Graf said, emphasizing that a drawdown is a more drastic lowering of a lake level.

SFWMD’s boundaries extend from Central Florida to Lake Okeechobee, and from coast to coast, from Fort Myers to Fort Pierce, south through the Everglades to the Florida Keys and Florida Bay.

Topics Florida Catastrophe Natural Disasters Flood Hurricane