Congressman Brian Mast doesn’t use the word “war” lightly. He knows a lot about war. Mast lost both legs and a finger to an IED while serving in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.
Mast uses the word to talk about the Army Corps of Engineers’ releases of Lake Okeechobee’s nutrient- and algae-laden waters into the St. Lucie and Indian rivers.
“This, for me, is a war,” he told St. Lucie Voice in an exclusive interview. “It’s a war for my community. It’s a war for our water, which affects our community top to bottom, which affects the economy of my community from top to bottom.”
Lake Okeechobee algae blooms and discharges represent a fast-moving story with frequent developments and mind-boggling complexities. Facts on the ground often move at breakneck speeds. At its core, however, the story is a glaciated cycle of the Army Corps of Engineers releasing destructive waters into the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee waterways to protect the Herbert Hoover Dike from disastrous failure, and protesters lining up against it.
The tiresome process is rooted, Mast explained, in the concept of shared adversity. In brief, there are problems and risks connected to Lake Okeechobee, so the Corps aims to spread both. Mast said shared adversity too often ignores fundamental fairness. The Lake Okeechobee nutrient load that feeds the cyanobacteria to blooming doesn’t come from the Treasure Coast.
“We’re not part of the stretch of the Kissimmee River, the entire watershed from Orlando south,” Mast said.
The headwaters of Lake Okeechobee start at Shingle Creek in Orange County and move southward through the Kissimmee River system. Development and agriculture along the way add nitrogen and phosphorous to the waters that enter Lake Okeechobee and feed its algae blooms.
Mast later continued, “We’ve done nothing to produce these toxins, but they want to share these toxins with a place that has nothing to do with it. That is war to me.”
A war, Mast said, that has victories wax and wane at times almost on an hour-by-hour basis.
“We’ve just come off 12 days of no discharges from Lake Okeechobee,” Mast said in the phone interview last Friday. “Every day of those 12 days was fought for.”
During those 12 days, news came out that the Office of Management and Budget approved money for building additional water storage south of the lake to be included in a major water-resources bill making its way through Congress at press time. Mast was in the thick of making sure that money for a proposed $1.6 billion reservoir got in.
“That’s a big thing we had to fight for, so we don’t have to wait two more years for that southern reservoir,” Mast said.
But, the victory was tempered by word Mast was getting that the blue-green algae being poured from the lake to Treasure Coast waterways was at toxic levels.
“The Florida Department of Environmental Protection, they said it’s 150 parts per billion of cyanobacteria,” Mast said. “That’s 15 times greater than the health organizations say is safe for human contact.”
The World Health Organization and others hold that water with blue-green algae exceeding 1 part per billion is unsafe to drink. Water with more than 10 parts per billion counts as unsafe for contact.
One doesn’t need to get wet to be endangered by blue-green algae blooms. They’re known to cause respiratory problems and nausea. Mast said there’s emerging research saying that could be just the start of human health problems related to being near large blue-green algae blooms. A chemical that blue-green algae produces, BMAA, is a neurotoxin that has been found to cause biological markers associated with Alzheimer’s disease in monkeys.
“That’s the only known cause of Alzheimer’s,” Mast said. Obviously, it’s not the only cause, however.
Mast said there is evidence blue-green algae causes liver damage, too.
“Our area, Martin County, has extremely high levels of liver disease,” Mast said. “Among the highest in the US.”
Mast noted the correlation doesn’t mean causation, so he’s awaiting more science before saying the high rates of liver diseases are related to the area’s repeated exposure to blue-green algae blooms.
Gov. Rick Scott has declared a seven-county state of emergency related to the Lake Okeechobee algae bloom being released along with the water. The counties are St. Lucie, Martin, Palm Beach, Okeechobee, Glades, Lee and Hendry. Blue-green algae likely from Lake Okeechobee has been reported as far north as the C-25 in Fort Pierce.
In September 2010, Mast was an explosive ordinance disposal technician in the Army. He was clearing a path for the storied Rangers in Kandahar when an IED detonated on him.
He received the Bronze Star, the Army Commendation Medal for Valor, the Purple Heart, and other notable medals. The Treasure Coast representative took his congressional seat in 2017.
During the 2016 elections, Mast repeatedly said his top aim was to get on the House Transportation & Infrastructure committee to have a greater voice in proposed projects related to Lake Okeechobee. He got that committee assignment. Mast is also the vice chairman of the Water Recourses & Environment subcommittee. Additionally, he’s a member of 10 congressional caucuses, including the Everglades Caucus and Congressional Estuary Caucus.
