Draining, Dredging And Other Florida Follies`

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If there were beings on Mars capable of holding a 30-power telescope with a plano-concave eyepiece, they would see planet Earth and make out the shape of its continents, in which case the one with the telescope might remark, “I don’t care what you say. There are canals on Florida.”

The Martian wouldn’t just be whistling Dixie. Florida is criss-crossed with canals, ditches and channelized rivers, many of them gutters cut into the limestone dredged to a grade of 0.3 per mile and filled with dead cats, old boots, cement blocks, shopping carts, gasoline cans, fire extinguishers and mats of jewel-toned algae.

The fact is, the Sunshine State has more canals than Venice, which can count only 150. With Bingo names like C-54 and L-20, there are reportedly 2,000 miles of canals in Florida, including 600 miles of waterways and ditches in our St. John’s River Water Management District which drain into the Indian River Lagoon. There is even a taxonomy, which includes dead-end canals, upland canals, comb-structured canals and, my favorite, the high order finger canal.

Canals are nothing new. Nebuchadnezzar II constructed huge canals to irrigate Babylon, a city-state of ancient Mesopotamia that is present-day Iraq. Only when the canals became blocked with silt did the land become the desert wasteland it is today.

Read the entire article in the April 2009 issue

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