Nature of Things: Fixing Lake Hancock and the Peace River is a project for the ages

Lake Hancock has been a green, algae-dominated lake for a long time.

State health officials issued reports in the early 1950s describing the nutrient and bacterial contamination that was flowing into the lake and the Peace River from inadequately treated sewage.

“Lake Hancock: A Great Big Nothing?” a 1968 newspaper headline read.

It was the scene of occasional fish kills.

Scientists use something called the Trophic State Index to measure lake health. It's a 100-point scale in which the lowest numbers on the scale indicate the best water quality. When scientists calculated Lake Hancock's TSI in the 1980s, it was off the chart. It hit 100 and kept going.

This wasn't surprising.

Municipal sewer plants and industrial plants in Lakeland and Auburndale had been discharging into creeks feeding the lake for decades. Stormwater runoff from as far away as Lake Gibson and Lake Parker flowed into it via Saddle Creek. Much of the eastern and southern shore was mined for phosphate, destroying wetlands that historically had mitigated pollution flowing to the lake from surrounding farm land.

Water managers and state officials explored various ways to clean up the lake. They talked about dredging the muck and financing the project with the proceeds from whatever phosphate rock was recovered in the process, but the lake was just too big to make such an undertaking financially feasible.

The only approach that appeared practical in the end was to pump some of the lake's water into a system of marshes created in the footprint of some of the old phosphate pits on the south side of the lake. As the water flowed through the marsh, algae on the plant stems would remove enough nitrogen to allow somewhat cleaner water to flow downstream toward Charlotte Harbor, one of Florida's major estuaries.

But along the way the lake's location at the headwaters of the Peace River gave rise to another concept.

Water levels in the upper Peace River had been stressed for a long time as a result of the overpumping of the aquifer that came with the expansion of the phosphate industry in Polk County and increased water use by farms and cities later on.

The first clue something was wrong came when Kissengen Spring quit flowing in 1950. It was the first time in Florida's history anything like that had happened.

Then, during the first of a series of droughts that struck the area in 1981, sections of the river itself had gone dry.

This has occurred periodically since then.

I witnessed a lot of this first-hand as I hiked dry portions of the river bed between Bartow and Homeland and saw the gaping openings in the river bed where water used to emerge from the aquifer and now disappeared.

Meanwhile, water managers began belatedly working on a project the Florida Legislature had assigned to them in 1972 as part of a long-overdue series of laws intended to protect Florida's natural resources.

Specifically, they were supposed to set minimum flows and levels for the state's water bodies and to come up with a way to meet those minimum levels for water bodies that fell short.

That's where Lake Hancock comes in.

Water managers determined that too often the Peace River wasn't meeting its minimum flow, an amount of water that was enough to let fish swim along the river.

The solution, they decided, was to replace the existing water-control structure on Saddle Creek south of the lake with an even bigger one.

That would allow them to raise the lake to what they calculated was its historic high level and to use some of that stored water to replenish the river flow so that it would meet its minimum flow more often.

This was ironic in a way because the original purpose of the structure that the Southwest Florida Water Management District inherited and had reworked to restore substandard river flow was originally built for flood control.

The decision to raise the lake meant that a lot of land that hadn't been flooded in a long time would go underwater or be in danger of submersion.

That meant Swiftmud had to buy out a lot of property owners along the shore of the lake and in the lowlands along Saddle Creek.

This was pretty expensive. By the time the land was purchased, the wetlands were created and the new structure was installed, the price tag came to $174 million.

Now Swiftmud officials are working on a plan to protect that investment by proposing rules that create a reservation for the water stored in Lake Hancock that's intended to restore flow in the Peace River, and to prevent the water from being diverted for another purpose.

The agency's staff has prepared a report laying out the details of the proposal. They presented it at a public meeting last week and the proposal will go to Swiftmud's Governing Board next month for a decision on whether to proceed with formal rule-making to make the plan binding.

Barring successful challenges, the rule is scheduled to be adopted later this year.

Meanwhile, the effort to legally establish a way to put more water into the river has raised other questions.

One that has generated some local interest is whether the plan could result in enough river flow so that some of it could be diverted to re-create a semblance of the natural swimming area that was once the centerpiece of Kissengen Spring in its heyday. The spring site is located south of Bartow near the river.

At this point, Swiftmud officials say they have no plan to do this.

Private discussions that have been occurring between environmentalists and landowners in the area may lead to a change of direction if a concrete proposal emerges.

It's part of a larger effort to make better use of the portion of the river in Polk County as a recreational corridor.

Stay tuned.

Tom Palmer's blog at www.ancientislands.org/conservation.