Dailey want to "bring back" Lake Jackson.
Mostly by filling in the sinkhole and any new sinks with dirt and limestone. First off, how well does that actually work? Everything I've read about sinkholes suggests to me that the groundwater will simply eat away at the fill until it, too, is gone. The guy who wants the contract filling in this and other sinks gave an estimate of $100,000 each. I may be wrong, but I would call that the very definition of "throwing money down a well."
Second, draining and refilling are part of the cycle of that lake (and many others in the south). I know our county commissioners don't often seem to know the differences between their asses and a hole in the ground when it comes to the local ecology, but damn. If the Department of Environmental Protection, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, and water quality specialists all agree that it might be a bad idea, maybe you should actually listen to them.
2 comments:
It's laughable. Or at least it would be funny except the conversation keeps bubbling back up. I'm no qualified expert but my family has lived on Lake Jackson for the past 32 years and I agree with you DG, damming sinkholes is not the answer. I call it "the water table". We are in a "drought". When the cycle circles back, the table will rise. When the table rises, the sinkholes (note the plurality because Lake Jackson is riddled with them) will plug and the lake will fill. There is no human engineering feat that we can do that will make a dent on the cycle and fate of Lake J. We've got to wait for the table to rise.
Mr. Dailey, the cleanup effort was not wasted just because we happen to be in a dry cycle. We're still clean of all the contaminants we hauled off. When the lake does refill, and geologic history shows that as almost inevitable, the lake will be healthier because of the cleanup.
Surely, surely we can count on DEP and the FFWC to kill these political soundbite ideas!! We need to look at the long-term picture here and go with the flow (or lack there of).
Seriously. And I'd like to know if there's any correlation between the building of all these holding ponds and the lack of water in the lakes. Maybe there's none. But maybe there is.
Seems to me that we just love to throw technology at problems long before we have any actual proof on how that technology might actually work.
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