While riding out West in the county, you might ask yourself, how the hell did these rock miners get to do all this rock mining in our wetlands next to the Everglades and our well fields and no one stopped them. How did they get the permits from the Army Corps to destroy wetlands? You know, I can’t answer this in this short blog. But one of the reasons SOME environmentalists went along with this stupid plan, was because they felt the lakes would create a boundary so people couldn’t move father West. One evil was better than the other.
This of course is an unscientific report by me, no expert to be sure. Okay. That said, there is of course more to the story.
Fast forward the Federal and State Government under tremendous public pressure, decided to partner together to clean up the Everglades and bring more water to the park which was parched during certain times of the year (from what I hear). Nesting birds need a particular level of water because of leg height and fish density in pools of water (don’t ask).
So, here is the problem. Water (rain) comes in torrents some times during the year so the government flushes it out to sea so they don’t flood the people. At other times we don’t have any rain. How do you save the water from the wet times for the dry times? The government came up with a plan. Why not make these lakes MUCH BIGGER and use the rock pit lakes to store water for the dry times?
The engineers at the Army Corps went to work on a lofty plan. One of the components of the CERP (Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Project) was to indeed store water in these very lakes for when they needed it. The problem? The lakes are porous and the water sinks in. Another problem, evaporation. Another problem, the Army Corps was told the solution had to withstand blasting by rock miners. Mind you, this is 20 years into the future, the government still expected the rock miners would be blasting.
I went to one of the meetings where they were proposing how to store the water. One of the solutions was to freeze the water in the giant lakes.
Anyway, here we are creating all these lakes in the lake belt, rock miners getting rich strip mining. So is it any surprise that another stupid plan was hatched: The County now wants to get in the rock mining business at Opa Locka Airport West? The County Commissioners want to dig themselves out of the financial hole at the Miami Airport using up our natural resources. Do we really need to extend the lake belt?
4 comments:
On another topic; in the current issue of the SF Business Journal on the Watershed plan it says that an email circulated by "activists" "suggested the added density could be approbed without public hearings." So according to this newspaper whore for the real estate industry "activists" are out to do in the counties homeowners and neighborhoods! SFBJ 2/9-15/07 pg4
ah.
I can't believe the county commission will try to legislate a zoning overlay in the cities and manage to pull it off.
They have not used the power to do that after all these years, and I believe somewhere the ability to do it was always there.
Besides,they would rather offer up nice undeveloped land to the developers outside UDB - it is less expensive for the concrete kings to build out there. And of course, we, the taxpayers, will happily pay to build the infrastructure and public facilities where there are none. The developers are not really thrilled about the prospect of clearing old neighborhoods and building clean affordable residental dwellings where we already have water and sewer, schools, libraries and police. It costs them money to clear buildings, and it is much cheaper build on farmland, or around those lovely rock pits. Waterfront is always nice. Don't you know?
Even if the county did it, they would use enviromental activists as the excuse to let residents vent anger at "elitist enviro..."
What are you all talking about?
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