Lake Tohopekaliga, Kissimmee: The Lake That Went Dry in 1987

In the mid-1980s, fisheries biologists proposed dropping Lake Tohopekaliga several feet, exposing the lake bottom to the sun, and physically scraping the accumulated muck off the shoreline. The technique had been tried on small residential water bodies — the Orlando Sentinel reported in 1986 that it had worked on 100-acre Lake Hunter. Toho covers 22,000 acres. Nobody had attempted muck removal at that scale. The biologists pushed for it anyway, proposing to remove the organic sediment that had built up over the sandy bottom where bass spawn.

The drawdown happened in 1987. Top state officials came out to watch. The Department of Environmental Regulation put $248,000 into the project, $100,000 of it collected through environmental fines levied elsewhere in Central Florida. Crews moved onto the dried lake bottom and hauled away the black, nutrient-loaded sediment covering the sandy substrate where bulrush and maidencane root. Photographs from the period show heavy equipment sitting on what is normally lake bottom.

Toho sits at a low point in a chain that drains a large piece of Central Florida. Shingle Creek runs 23 miles down from the Pine Hills area of Orlando before emptying in, and the Boggy Creek headwaters reach back to what is now Orlando International Airport. As Orlando grew, the load came south — fertilized lawns, wastewater plants, paved acreage. By the late 20th century secondary effluent from nearby cities was flowing in, cyanobacteria that had existed only at trace levels were blooming, and the muck on the bottom kept getting deeper. Wastewater diversions in the 1980s cut the phosphorus inputs sharply. The drawdown handled what had already settled.