Saddlebag Lake, Lake Wales: The Five Months of Pumping It Took to Get the Water Out

Polk County decided to spend up to $500,000 on three powerful pumps and two miles of pipe. Running that pipe took permits from the South Florida and Southwest Florida water management districts and agreements with adjacent landowners, and the people on the receiving end were not enthusiastic: residents of Lake Rosalie feared that pumping out a closed basin would carry sewer, fertilizer and chemicals into their lake. Pumping began Sept. 15 and stopped four days later, when water samples failed to meet state standards for fecal coliform. Spence said additional tests showed the problem stemmed from water flowing into the ditch from adjacent fields rather than from Saddlebag Lake. The intake pipe was repositioned and the pumps restarted. The residents' association paid the county $30,000 to cover that first month, and $30,000 a month after — diesel fuel, and part of the overtime for keeping someone at the pump full time to keep it oiled and running.

The pumping was less efficient than expected, partly because there was so much more lake than usual. Bob Lapsley, who headed the residents' emergency committee, told The Ledger that Saddlebag normally covers about 287 acres and had spread to closer to 500, running past its banks and merging with three smaller lakes nearby. With pumping and no rain, the level dropped about half an inch a day. Then Hurricane Wilma blasted past south of Polk County on Oct. 24, and its rains raised the lake about 8 inches, undoing the impact of more than a month of pumping and bringing Saddlebag to within a quarter inch of its all-time high. By mid-November the main entrance road was still about 9 inches beneath the surface of the water, and the lake was coming down a quarter inch at a time.

Floodwater had infiltrated the sewer lines, leaving the wastewater plant operating at or above capacity. Portable toilets went up around the development and residents were told not to run clothes washers or dishwashers. Nathalie Maggard, the resort's executive director, described what she told the winter residents who came back anyway: "We tell them to drink all the water they want, just don't put it down the drain."

The pumps ran until March 1, 2006. Five months of moving water about two miles through a series of pipes and ditches to Lake Rosalie, part of the Kissimmee Chain of Lakes, brought Saddlebag to 104 feet, 7.5 inches — past the county's goal of 105 feet, with water out of the homes and off the streets. About 300 of the 789 units had been flooded or cut off by the water. Repairs were expected to cost owners $1,300 to $7,000 per unit, and the county stationed a representative of its building department inside the development to handle the inspections required before that work could start.

A permanent fix was already being drawn. Commissioners had put up to $137,700 toward studies of drainage around Saddlebag, Belle, Tractor and Thomas lakes, all of them landlocked, with no outlets to help them drain. On Dec. 18, 2006, the Southwest Florida Water Management District announced an agreement with Polk County on a project estimated at up to $2.1 million: outfall structures and a conveyance system of pipes and ditches between Saddlebag Lake and Lake Thomas, Parks Lake, Cypress Lake, Little Gum Lake, Big Gum Lake and Stock Lake, paid for evenly by the district's Peace River Basin Board and the county, with completion set for December 2011.

The next summer's rains were slow to arrive — the Division of Forestry office at Catfish Creek, northeast of Lake Wales, measured 2.55 inches for June 2007. By the last week of that month Saddlebag had dropped more than seven feet from its high, to 99 feet, 9 inches, and residents were worried about having enough water to get their pontoon boats out of the lagoon and onto the lake.