Video
Cape Sable Dams Project
Descriptive Transcript
Dan Kimball: Hi, my name is Dan Kimball. I'm the superintendent of Everglades and Dry Tortugas National Parks. And today I'd like to talk about a very, very important ecosystem restoration project to the park, and this project is what we call the Cape Sable plugging project. We're very fortunate, this is an American Recovery and Reinvestment Act project that was approved by Congress and by the president, to bring over $7 million to Everglades National Park to do this important plugging. So with this project, we have enough funding to get them built and get them built right.
Description Narrator: A sign reads: U.S. Department of the Interior. Your Recovery Dollars at Work. www.recovery.gov. Everglades National Park. Replacement of Two failed Dams on Cape Sable. The sign shows a map of the affected area.
Text: Cape Sable Dams Project. Everglades National Park. Funded by the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ARRA).
Dan Kimball: Cape Sable is a very remote part of Everglades National Park, it's really the very southwest corner of the State of Florida. Not many visitors go there because it's a challenge to get there. The key way to get there is either canoeing or power boating out of Flamingo, and it's about ten miles to the west of Flamingo. So, it's a hefty paddle to get there.
Description Narrator: A close-up of the park map shows Flamingo in the south and Cape Sable to the west of Flamingo.
Dan Kimball: We have white shell beaches and then we have mangroves, and then we also have a freshwater backcountry area.
Description Narrator: A pelican dives into the water next to a man fishing from a kayak.
Dan Kimball: It's the kind of area where you can see alligators and crocodiles and both freshwater feeding birds and also marine birds, as well. So, they're roseate spoonbills and kind of a full assemblage of freshwater species as well.
Description Narrator: A park ranger in a boat.
Tony Terry: Tony Terry is my name, and I'm the district ranger of the Flamingo District in Everglades National Park. And we're now stationary at the mouth of the East Cape Canal.
Description Narrator: Aerial footage shows the East Cape Canal connecting to Lake Ingraham, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico.
Tony Terry: It was originally dug by the Model Land Company back in the twenties to try and drain this area and make it a area to be developed for people to buy land, settle here, and maybe one day this would have been Miami. But it didn’t make it to that, thank goodness.
We basically disturbed the natural process in the twenties by digging these canals. And so, a more natural phase would be saltwater outside of this canal, and the mainland would separate, and then we would have some fresh water that's more fresh in the summer during the rainy season than more so in the winter season.
Park took over it, late forties, ‘47. We were able to try and plug some of them. That happened in the fifties. First noticed the dam being a problem with the breakage, back right after Hurricane Andrew. We realized that it need to be replaced. In ‘97, they put a new type of dam in with sheet pallets and that worked for five, six years. And then the water came around the side of it and washed all that out.
Description Narrator: A map of the Cape Sable shows the inland location of the two failed damns, in Homestead Canal and the East Cape Extension. Text: Earthen damns from late 1950s failed by 1992. Sheet-piling dams from 1997 failed by 2003.
Tony Terry: The habitat back there wants to be more freshwater, and that's historically for hundreds of years, is what it has. And what we're running into is it has more salt water, so we're killing off a lot of the Marsh area by not having enough freshwater back there.
If we didn't have a dam here in this area right now. The canal will keep getting wider because of the erosion going off. Right now, with the canals open, the water just runs right in or there's no slow flooding.
So for 18 years, we've been talking about repairing this dam and repairing it the correct way, and this is the project that hopefully will restore this area to a more natural flooding process behind the dams.
Description Narrator: An excavator on a barge moves limestone sand onto the barge.
The barge makes its way down the canal.
Chris Sheedy: My name is Chris Sheedy. I'm a project manager for this project for Jay Cashman Inc. We're a company out of Quincy, Mass. This is the Cape Sable dams project, where they’re constructing dams and the East Cape Extension Canal and the Homestead Canal.
We're about 50% complete on this project right now, right on schedule. This is the East Cape Canal. The sheets have all been driven. There's about 490 lineal feet of steel sheeting, two bulkheads approximately 100 feet apart and in between that is an earthen plug, which is this limestone sand you see being put in right now.
We're constructing now because this is the non-nesting season, and the nesting season goes between April first and October first.
Description Narrator: A juvenile crocodile sits on limestone rock. Text: American crocodile nesting season is April to October.
Chris Sheedy: So, you can't work in and around this area. From my understanding, it's designed to withstand hurricane and tropical storms. To what extent? What category? I'm not 100% sure of, but they did put a lot of effort into ensuring that this particular structure, same over at Homestead, is going to be able to withstand those storm events.
The Riprap is on all four corners, and that's for erosion control because you will get some floods here in this, you know, get some storm events as well, and the riprap tied into the land area will keep the area from being washed out. This is a combination of steel sheeting, riprap, and soil plug dam system that all work together to keep the canal the way it's going to be.
Description Narrator: An aerial photograph of the dam site labels the riprap jutting into the surrounding land in the four corners of the site. A barge floats in the center.
The scene changes to Chris at the Homestead Canal.
Chris Sheedy: The water already upstream of this area has already become way more clean than it was previously because of the sediments. Because the turbidity values have gone way down. The riprap really is the cornerstone of the project in terms of maintaining the integrity of the dam, maintaining the integrity of the canal. Without it, eventually, the soil materials would fall into the river, though the water would come around the sheet piles that have been installed there. So, it's as important to the project as the steel sheeting is, it cuts the water source off.
Description Narrator: Aerial footage shows the Homestead Canal connecting to Lake Ingraham.
Chris Sheedy: You could actually build an entire dam out of the riprap if you needed to, but in this particular case, the sheets stop the water completely, where you'd get some kind of penetration through the riprap. Everything has to be trucked down to a staging area that's already predisposed by National Park Service in Key West. So, everything gets placed on barges there and then brought over here about 70 nautical miles to the Cape Sable area. And we unload it and we have a tug service constantly going back and forth with empty barges, loaded them, and bringing them out with full barges.
Description Narrator: A tug maneuvers a barge loaded with supplies.
Chris Sheedy: But for the most part, our labor, equipment, and material resources came from South Florida. All the limestone sand, the riprap is all indigenous to southern, South Florida, which was part of the design. The steel sheets were bought from a company that was located South Florida. Almost all the labor here, except for a couple of management personnel, are all from the South Florida region.
Yunesky Hernandez: Well, right now, we’re sitting inside the Dottie. I'm the Dottie driver, driving the tugboat back and forward. My full name is Yunesky Hernandez, I'm from Cuba, and I live down here in Miami. I've been here for ten years. Ten years driving the barge around. So, a little bit complicated, sometimes with the current, but I can handle it. I can handle it.
Well, if I didn't have this job, I’d be at home, sitting at home, collecting unemployment, doing nothing at home. And when I get here and I see the alligators and, you know, that's kind of exciting for me because I never seen that before, especially in a national park. I’ve never been in a national park before. So that's cool. When this project is gone, first thing I'm going to do. I'm going to come back here fishing because this is good fishing back here, so…and I'm going to bring my wife back here too. [radio squawks]
Description Narrator: A sign reads: Caution, Manatee Area.
Chris Sheedy: This is about as remote south as I've ever been and seeing this kind of a natural environment. It's been a nice experience for me and for some of the other management that's working for Cashman that's here.
Crocodiles, we've seen rattlesnakes, alligators are out here, all kinds of different birds: the pelicans, the white ibis.
Speaker 1: Manatees.
Chris Sheedy: Yeah, manatees. We've seen manatees, a lot of manatees inside the marina and a lot of dolphin. That's a cool thing to see, about 24 to 30 dolphin all in a big rush. Sharks, no doubt. Yeah.
Description Narrator: A construction crew works on the dam.
Pelicans fly over open water and exposed mudflats. A close-up of limestone rock and mangrove shoreline along a canal.
Dan Kimball: These canals that were cut out in the 1920s were very effective at draining water out of the freshwater marsh, and then also providing for an avenue for marine water to go into the freshwater ecosystem.
So, you've gone from what was freshwater, now to a much saltier brackish environment. And because of that, there have been adverse effects. For example, on crocodiles. Crocodiles are very dependent on a brackish habitat, especially juvenile crocodiles.
In summary, this this project provides benefits on a lot of different fronts. The major goal of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is to reinvigorate the economy and provide for jobs, and it certainly does that. Second thing this project does, it does a great job in restoring the ecosystem of the park, particularly when we do not have the funding normally to carry these things out, nor is this project part of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. Our goal is to not only restore this area, but a wide range of impaired habitats in the park. And with this project, we've shown that we can get the job done.
Description Narrator: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service. Everglades National Park. National Park Service logo.
Everglades National Park Video.
Featuring: Park Superintendent Dan Kimball, Park Ranger Tony Terry, Chris Sheedy, Yunesky Hernandez.
Producer, Director, Editor: Jennifer Brown.
Executive Producers: Allyson Gantt, Alan Scott, Linda Friar.
Aerial Footage Courtesy of: Lori Oberhofer.
Special Thanks: Dewitt Smith, Stanley Wilhite.
Description
Video about Everglades restoration project in Cape Sable funded by the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ARRA) (10 min. with closed-captions).
Duration
9 minutes, 55 seconds
Credit
NPS video by Jennifer Brown
Date Created
03/04/2011
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