MIAMI — Lake Okeechobee, Florida’s liquid heart, is once again exploding with a massive algae bloom, a deepening crisis that threatens to slime both coasts in what has become a recurring summer nightmare.

This week, thick green blooms the consistency of a sickening smoothie seeped down the rural Caloosahatchee River toward the southwest coast. More ooze piled up on the lake’s eastern banks, pushing against a gate leading to million-dollar waterfront homes and businesses along the St. Lucie River estuary. While state testing has so far confirmed only low amounts of toxic cyanobacteria, Calusa Waterkeeper, a nonprofit Fort Myers river watch group, posted sample results recently showing levels hundreds of times above what is considered the safe limits for human exposure in some of the hardest hit areas.

“It’s kind of horrific,” Chandler Moulds, 19, said earlier this week as he cast a jig into a thick mat of algae at Barron Park in LaBelle, home of the famed Swamp Cabbage Festival. “I’ve lived in LaBelle my whole life and I’ve never seen it like this before.”

FAILURE TO ADDRESS POLLUTION

If it continues, the summer of slime could have wide-ranging implications, from politics to business. Florida Gov. Rick Scott, who consistently cut funding to the state’s environmental regulators, issued emergency orders to state water managers to try to stop the spread of a nasty green wave that looms as a potential stain for his ongoing campaign for the U.S. senate.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers also announced plans Thursday to stop releases to the East Coast for nine days, to allow time for tides to flush the algae. But they warned the lake dumping would likely resume as summer rains push water levels higher.

Along the coast, where monthslong blooms hammered the St. Lucie in 2016, businesses and residents are bracing for the worst.

“The waters were starting to clear a little bit before this happened again,” said Mary Radabaugh, manager at Central Marina in Stuart where 8-inch thick algae mats paralyzed the marina two summers ago. “We were starting to have more of those turquoise waters, but absolutely no life.”

For environmentalists, who’ve argued for decades that the state needs to do more to monitor and clean its water, the bloom is just the latest evidence of the state’s failure to address its polluted water. It’s a problem they say will continue to be as inevitable as the steamy summers.

“So the $64,000 question is why? Why?” said biologist John Cassani, director of Calusa Waterkeeper. “Those of us who’ve been following political decisions, the false narratives, the half-truths, the broken promises to address nutrient over-enrichment, this is a manifestation of that. So to us who have been following it for decades, it’s like damn. Why do we keep getting all these diversions and deceptions. It just gets worse.”

Scientists began to worry this spring that the lake might be in for a major bloom following Hurricane Irma, which whipped up the lake with tropical storm force winds as it moved north, mixing up a silty bottom where decades of nutrients have settled. Massive amounts of stormwater, loaded with even more nutrients, also got dumped from the north and flattened western marshes that help filter water before entering the Caloosahatchee.

RECORD RAINFALL IN MAY

Then came heavy rain in May, shattering a century-old record.

Normally, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which maintains the lake’s dike and controls water levels, tries to keep lake levels higher during the dry season and lower during the summer rainy season – to protect aquatic life in the lake but also to relieve pressure on its aging earthen dike.

The Corps is in the midst of a $1.6 billion repair job to shore up the dike and has completed repairs on some stretches. But the heavy rain made the releases of the nutrient-laced waters to the coasts inescapable. By last week, the deepening bloom covered half the lake, and quickly began piling up on the shores of the Caloosahatchee and in finger canals. In the River Oaks neighborhood just west of LaBelle, the algae left a scummy line on docks and pilings, and socked in sailboats and pontoons.

DEVELOPMENT BREEDS PROBLEMS

How it got this bad is rooted in the state’s old flood control and its struggle to meet all needs. The lake was mostly disconnected from the coasts before development, spilling water during the rainy season over a lower bottom lip that flowed south through marshes and into the Everglades. Beginning in the late 1800s, falls and other snags were removed from the Caloosahatchee to make it more navigable.

In the 1940s, the federal government launched its Central & South Florida Project to drain the region, build a water supply and flood control system and enclose the lake with a massive dike. The design essentially provided the lake with two plugs, to the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee. Another gate to the south allows water for irrigation, but is far smaller than the east and west gates.

Over the years, the lake also filled up with nutrients, mostly from farm and ranch run-off in the beginning, but now the polluted inflow includes a mix of urban stormwater and pollution from leaky septic tanks. State environmental regulators set the limit for the amount of phosphorus coming into the lake, but the amount is regularly far more than the lake can handle. And with such a large bloom, not much can be done but to wait and watch.

“When it covers hundreds of square miles, there’s really nothing you can do,” Gray said.

Beyond the public health threats, the unsightly blooms have triggered fish kills and wiped out oysters and sea grass.

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