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Copyright Seattle Times Sep 28, 1998
MIAMI - Hurricane Georges might finally settle an old argument about hurricanes in Florida Bay: Will a hurricane blow away some of the bay's ecological problems, or might it make them worse?
Arguments over Florida Bay have gone on for years as fishermen and scientists watched the bay's sea grass die, destructive algae bloom and marine life decline. Capt. Ed Davidson is among those who believe the bay needs a good cleansing such as the one last delivered by Hurricane Donna in 1960.
"We've had serious water-quality problems in recent years because it's been many, many decades since a hurricane flushed sediments out of Florida Bay out into the Gulf of Mexico," said Davidson, the owner of a Keys dive shop and the president of the Florida Audubon Society. "This hurricane should have finally done it. It should have blown a trillion tons of yucky stuff out of the bay."
But Tom Armentano, a scientist at Everglades National Park, argues that Georges might undermine some ecological improvements in the bay spurred in the past five years by heavier-than-usual rainfall that brought badly needed fresh water into a bay that had become too salty after a long drought in the 1980s.
In the past few years, sea-grass beds have been recovering, and the algal blooms and the so-called Dead Zone in the western bay have been shrinking, said Armentano, who is co-chairman of a federal and state scientific panel that directs Florida Bay research programs.
"We want to see if that recovery is going to be set back by this storm," Armentano said. "It's possible that the storm would have spread sediments over the bottom and buried shoots of emerging sea grasses."
Veteran fishing guide Mike Collins believes the truth will be somewhere in the middle.
"Hurricanes are good events for the bay," he said. "I think stirring up the bay bottom is good, but I don't think it's going to be the big solution that a lot of people think."
Meanwhile, ecologists who study corals are worried that the slow-moving hurricane might have devastated reefs in the Middle and Lower Keys and Dry Tortugas plagued by diseases caused by pollution and rising water temperatures.
"This storm followed a similar path to the one that Donna took when it nearly wiped out elkhorn corals in the Dry Tortugas in 1960," said biologist Walter Jaap of the Florida Marine Research Institute. "Considering how long that storm took to get through there, it's possible that there'll be some big structural damages."
Sometimes hurricanes help reefs by blowing away damaging sediments. Hurricane Andrew in 1992, for example, surprised ecologists.
"We had expected total devastation of the reefs based on what we saw on land," Jaap said. "But the storm rocketed through the reefs in a hurry, and its damage was far less than anyone could have guessed."
Credit: KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
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