One Sick Trickle

The creek, which is an average of six feet deep and a dozen feet wide, continues due northwest from Cedars, slicing behind the VA Medical Center and, beyond the Seventeenth Street bridge, through a stretch so choked with sludge and weeds and litter as to make passage impossible by anything other than a strongly paddled canoe or kayak (recommended outerwear for the latter: a full-length drysuit). Past housing for the elderly and high-rise tenements, the next stretch is covered in a mat of hydrilla woven so thick that a tossed beer can -- or Voit playground ball or used condom or Hardee's cola cup with a straw -- would not touch water.

At Twentieth Street the creek disappears into an underground culvert that leads to the southeast corner of Comstock Park at Seventeenth Avenue and 26th Street, the historic headwaters of the creek. In the late 1950s the stretch that runs beneath the industrial and residential neighborhoods of Allapattah was buried under cement to help keep the creek litter-free.

When Harry Ledford moved into his quaint two-bedroom house on NW Thirteenth Court, his back yard sloped down to Wagner Creek and looked out over the golf course. That was 46 years ago. Twenty years ago he planted a bush that has grown into a thick, eight-foot-high wall of green. From his back yard it's nearly impossible to see the creek any more or, for that matter, the towers of the medical complex that has replaced the links.

Privacy and security were the main reasons he walled himself in. "Lost about ten bicycles, all kinds of gardening equipment," reports the retired Wometco vending-machine salesman, whose single-family home is one of only a few still located on the creek north of Eleventh Street and the Seybold Canal. Ledford also says the dense foliage cuts down on the noise from the parking lots and hospital buildings, as well as from the encampment of homeless men who sleep under the bushes on the other side of the creek. "I regard the creek as a minus now," says Ledford, a large man with a handlebar mustache and a glancing resemblance to Pres. William Howard Taft. "It's nothin' but a drainage ditch. I've been trying to get the city to do something since Hurricane Andrew -- all this shit blown into the canal. I think they got federal money or something, but the last city manager put it in his pocket. I talked to the city for two years. They'd say, 'Well, now. That's the county.' The county would say, 'Well, that's the city.' I finally gave up on it. I'm gonna get the heck outta here."

Ledford's next-door neighbor, attorney Alan Soven, has felt similar frustration but isn't leaving anytime soon. He recently constructed new offices on the creek. The city required him to get an $850 variance to build a parking lot next to the waterway. "Eight hundred and fifty dollars only because they called it 'waterfront property'!" he bellows. "What a joke! Tell me that's not a joke! Have you seen it?" Soven goes on without a breath. "Besides smelling horrendous, there's crap and garbage and most of the time you can't see the bottom. Once the police were chasing a guy who broke out of jail and the guy ran across the water. Ran right across my property and ran across the water! Do you believe that? This was the next reincarnation of Moses. Did Moses do that? Walk on water? Who walked across the water? Moses? Anyway," he says, resuming his harangue, "what is the city doing about it? I've been complaining for ten years. They don't care. They all point the finger: bureaucracy, ya know. They've done nothing about it."

Well, not exactly, but close. For years environmental regulators have been aware of the extent of contamination in the creek, including extremely high levels of nitrogen and phosphorus along with an overabundance of trace metals such as lead, copper, and cadmium. In addition, the concentration of fecal coliform bacteria, a reliable indicator of human and animal waste, has been measured at nearly 38 times the state water quality standard.

Government officials have also known the general causes of the creek's chronic contamination but have done little to rectify them. The sources are numerous: direct dumping of litter, as well as solid and industrial waste; rainwater washing trash and pollutants from parking lots and streets into the stormwater system, which drains into the creek; illegal connections between the wastewater and stormwater drainage systems; even some pipes carrying raw sewage directly from toilets and industrial drains into the waterway. The creek has on occasion turned pitch black from contamination and stunk like death -- "going septic" is what Robert Menge, Dade's river-enforcement coordinator, calls the phenomenon.