POST TIME: Ten years ago, Lake Okeechobee dropped to lowest point ever

Readers: Memories are short, and after the dousing Palm Beach County got the first week of June, kicking off what might well turn out to be a really wet wet-season, it’s hard to recall the record-breaking deluge ended what had been a disconcerting drought.

Ten years ago, the region was gripped in a dry spell that was both historic and catastrophic. How dry was it? On July 2, 2007, Lake Okeechobee — a “canary in the coal mine” for the local water supply picture — dropped to its lowest point on record, 8.82 feet above sea level.

Follow the Palm Beach Post’s weather reporter, Kim Miller, on her WeatherPlus blog

As always, tropical systems were key players in both the start and end of what would become a 2½-year drought.

The highest reading at the lake was 18.7 feet in 1947. Hurricane Wilma, in October 2005, had brought the lake up a foot and a half to more than 17 feet, and the following September, after Tropical Storm Ernesto raised it a foot in a matter of days, it was at 13 feet. But then things went downhill — or, at least, down the drain.

The thing to look for in watching for a drought is not a dry dry-season; after all, that six-month stretch accounts for just about 30 percent of the region’s annual rainfall, which by Palm Beach International Airport readings average 62 inches. Rather, the problems come when the other six-month stretch, the wet season, isn’t wet.

By July 2007, the lake had dropped more than 4 feet to that all-time low of 8.82.

Water managers scrambled to prevent salt water from intruding into well fields in Riviera Beach, Manalapan, Boynton Beach, Delray Beach, Highland Beach and Boca Raton. The South Florida Water Management District shut off water to most of the region’s tributary canals, redirecting it to coastal areas. Residents were urged to conserve.

One of the more dramatic visuals was in May 2008: waterway channel markers standing several feet above what should have been a 2½-mile-long canal. Like any backyard pond, as the lake’s level dropped, it had shrunk, turning tens of thousands of acres of lake bottom into dry land.

Related story: What’s behind names of Lake Okeechobee’s Ritta, Kreamer, Torry islands?

But by that summer of 2008, it was over. And how.

The lake is three-fourths the size of Rhode Island and contains, at capacity, an astounding 1 trillion gallons of water. It takes a staggering amount of rain to raise the level by even 6 inches. Tropical Storm Fay did it in two days.

The storm dropped 2 feet of water over parts of the Space Coast and a foot over parts of the Treasure Coast. Then water from rain that saturated the Kissimmee River flood plain worked its way done. Soon the lake was to almost 15 feet above sea level. That was high enough to prompt the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to do something that had been unthinkable just months earlier: begin sending excess water out to sea.