Polluted Lake Apopka seems poised for rebirth | Video, pictures

By the end of next year, those overseeing the giant lake's restoration expect to flood the last of the long-fallow farms along the lake's north shore, transforming them into a vast marsh resembling the area's original, natural environment.

The celebrated attempt to restore Lake Apopka that backfired a dozen years ago haunts a new, more-cautious effort now to revive some of the most defiled water in the country.

That cropland is still stained with notorious pesticides that in 1998 killed hundreds of pelicans, wading birds and raptors when the flooding was first tried. But this time, anxious scientists have taken steps to prevent the toxic residue from poisoning a wetlands food chain that is expected to burst to life again once the field pumps are turned off and rains inundate the fertile soil.

The project's goal: end the dumping of foul farmland runoff into one of the state's largest lakes — just six miles from Orlando — in the hope that, after decades as a repulsive body of water, it will once again attract large numbers of sightseers, anglers, boaters and wildlife.

"We can imagine it being a very popular destination," said Robert Christianson, land-resources director for the St. Johns River Water Management District, which is responsible for the restoration.

The lake, which covers 50 square miles of Orange and Lake counties, won't become anyone's favorite swimming hole anytime soon.

For much of the past century, sewage plants, citrus processors and giant vegetable farms dumped their wastewater into what had long been treasured as a fishing paradise. That runoff was polluted with phosphorus and nitrogen compounds, which fed a devastating growth of algae. The lake's waters thickened into a sickly green slop that smothered aquatic grasses and lily pads while nurturing trash fish.

Scientists working on the lake's rebirth see no feasible way now to actively cleanse the lake's 53 billion gallons. But once runoff from the former farmland is cut off, the mass of algae, bubbling with fumes of decomposition, should sink and solidify within a few decades, if not a few years, restoration manager Dave Walker said.

The more immediate appeal of the project is what it would do to the 20,000 acres of former farmland on the north shore, turning it into a haven for an astonishing number of bird species.

When much of that land, acquired by the state in the 1990s, was flooded in the fall of 1998, it attracted more than 100,000 birds in nearly 200 varieties. Explanations for its popularity varied: The birds had ancestral memories of a healthy Lake Apopka. The huge lake was a visual bull's-eye for migrating flocks. The infant wetlands were the avian equivalent of a new and very tempting roadside restaurant.

But after gorging on fish swimming in the shallow waters of the former cropland, at least a thousand birds died, their brains laced with highly lethal doses of agricultural pesticides. The farmland was pumped dry to cut short the massacre.

Today, after postmortem experiments and a cautious resumption of the flooding in monitored phases, the birds are back.

348 bird species

Self-taught ornithologist Harry Robinson of DeLand has become something of a legend by documenting Apopka's birds at least three days a week, 12 hours each day.