The reservoir's dark waters also are plagued by a constant growth of floating weeds, such as this clump of water lettuce. Kevin Spear / Orlando Sentinel The Ocklawaha River’s Rodman Reservoir feels isolated and unworldly. A lot of people began to really believe.” “Marjorie Carr’s opposition to it was utterly fantastic,” wrote Nathaniel Reed, one of Florida’s most lauded conservation leaders, in his book of essays, “Travels on the Green Highway.” “She really believed. She and her husband, Archie, of Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge, would be acclaimed their conservation work. The carnage inspired the “Micanopy housewife,” environmental scientist Marjorie Harris Carr, to found the Florida Defenders of the Environment group. The ceiling was a darkening canopy of cypress, maples, sweetgums and cabbage palms. The river bottom was white sand or a maze of dark trunks of trees that had tipped over. Fish, manatees and turtles appeared to hover in the air. But the Rodman Dam and Reservoir had obliterated 16 miles of magnificence.įed by springs, the Ocklawaha’s current was invisible. In 1971, President Richard Nixon halted the canal as needless for shipping and ruinous for Florida’s environment. Rather than clearing away forest for the reservoir, the crawler flattened but also left millions of standing trees. It was a hasty, brutal job, done with a “crawler-crusher” resembling a battle tank as big as a five-story building. Army Corps of Engineers would fix that by turning the slender river into a wide reservoir. With work starting in the 1960s, the Cross Florida Barge Canal route would link a series of rivers and lakes, including the Ocklawaha, which was not large enough to carry barges. That's a legacy of the hasty construction of the dam and reservoir in the 1960s that left many trees in the reservoir's boundary.Ī dam was built there to be part of a 110-mile shortcut for coal barges across the state’s peninsula, connecting the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Tree trunks and branches continually pile against the dam's upstream side. Kevin Spear / Orlando Sentinel Seen here is Rodman Dam along the Ocklawaha River. It’s that final, 20-mile bend to the east where the Ocklawaha met with disaster. The 74-mile river begins west of Orlando, extends north, takes in the powerful current of Silver Springs, then turns east to join the St. “There isn’t a question about the science behind restoring the Ocklawaha. “Every day that dam is in place it is damaging the St. Johns River and blunting the harm of rising temperatures and levels of seawater, she said. Johns River, including through Jacksonville.Ī free-flowing Ocklawaha with its resurrected wetlands would result in more, cooler and cleaner water reaching the St. She contends that restoring the Ocklawaha’s free flow is the most important step available for shoring up the distressed health of the lower and estuary portion of the St. The ongoing, ecological price of not removing the dam has been high, said Lisa Rinaman, leader of the St. Geological Survey, National Geospatial Program Map services and data available from U.S.
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