Sun-Sentinel, Wednesday, April 2, 1997

Eyes of the world on 'Glades cleanup

International visitors see environmental restoration firsthand

By NEIL SANTANIELLO
Staff writer

It's not every day somebody in South Florida has visitors from the Okinawa Prefecture.

Or is called on by the Minister of Water Resources for Bangladesh.

Would you be prepared to receive the African Development Bank?

Such is life these days at the South Water Management District. The door of its headquarters near West Palm Beach is revolving with foreigners curious about what is possibly the largest environmental repair job in the world- The Everglades restoration.

District officials, since 1993, have led overseas delegations on 25 or more tours of the district's flood control operations and its working model for the Everglades cleanup- a 3,800-acre filter marsh near 20 Mile Bend. The marsh is the main lure.

"For a lot of them, that is the primary thing they want to see," said Bob Kral of the district's Broward County Service Center.

The filter marsh, the largest of its kind in the world, is called the Everglades Nutrient Removal Project.

It already is dramatically reducing pollution flushed into the Everglades by farm run-off, and that is of keen interest to visitors from Peru, Zimbabwe, Greece, Ecuador, Argentina and elsewhere.

Some visitors have been high-level government officials: advisers to presidents, or leaders of agriculture or environmental agencies, accompanied by State Department escort.

Some are college students, such as the environmental engineering majors from Switzerland who dropped by March 7, the most recent visitors.

Others are scientists and technical people, film crews working on documentaries.

Many visitors leave impressed at the attention paid in the United States to environmental problems and wetlands restoration, said Sharon Hasty, the district's current tour guide.

She said she hears the same thing again and again from the groups' leaders: Their countries are 30 or 40 years behind the United States in environmental matters, and they're trying to catch up.

Foreign delegations are given an overview of the district's flood-control mission. That includes a tour of its nerve center, a control room where technicians push buttons that can activate mammoth pumps and steel plated gates to move water through 1,800 miles of canals across the region.

But visitors are eventually led to an observation tower off State Road 80, south of 20 Mile Bend.

There, sandwiched between the Everglades Agricultural Area and northern Everglades, they can look over the prototype for 63 square miles of phosphorous traps that water managers plan to have completed by 2003.

Farm fields are feeding too much of that fertilizer into the Everglades sawgrass plains, which evolved on an ultra-low phosphorous diet. Overdoses of the nutrient are harming the marshes by triggering explosions of cattails that crowd out native sawgrass, upsetting the fragile balance of plants and animals in the Everglades.