WATER & COAST
Lake Okeechobee
Okeechobee County · Central Florida
Seven hundred and thirty square miles of fresh water, the largest lake wholly inside the lower forty-eight states outside the Great Lakes.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
The name is Hitchiti, from oki meaning water and chubi meaning big. For its size it is remarkably shallow, averaging about nine feet, which is why the wind can move it so violently. In 1926 the Great Miami hurricane broke the original levee and killed around three hundred people; in 1928 the Okeechobee hurricane pushed the lake over the settlements on the south shore and the National Weather Service revised the death toll in 2003 to at least twenty-five hundred. The Herbert Hoover Dike, forty feet high, was built afterwards, and a rehabilitation costing about one and a half billion dollars finished in January 2023, three years early. The Okeechobee Waterway, completed in 1937, runs across the state through the lake. Five counties share it: Okeechobee, Glades, Hendry, Martin and Palm Beach. It is known across the country for largemouth bass and black crappie fishing. Algal blooms driven by phosphorus remain the lake's central problem
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