One Sick Trickle

A year ago the City of Miami, which has primary jurisdiction over the creek, decided to do something about the scandal. Engineers wheeled in some heavy dredging equipment and scooped out about 1800 cubic yards of sludge and trash between Fourteenth Avenue and Comstock Park. (For the culverted section they used superpowerful water hoses to blast out the trash, which had clogged the pipes so that water could barely flow: an industrial-size enema.) Workers also retrofitted sewer piping, corrected illegal connections, and installed new drains that are supposed to filter out debris. They erected nearly 3000 linear feet of fencing along the creek's edge, removed pest plants such as Brazilian pepper, and planted 100 red-tip cocoplums and 160 sea oxeye daisies. The project cost $590,000 and took six months. Afterward the creek nearly sparkled.

Looking at the waterway today, you wouldn't know any work had ever been done. As one approaches the Twentieth Street bridge the canal is practically invisible under the trash and the hydrilla. The exotic plants have fought back and seem to be winning. City of Miami engineer Hector Badia admits that it's "frustrating" to watch all the city's hard work disappear for lack of maintenance funds and manpower, but he denies the project was a waste of time. "There's much more flow through the culvert now," he points out. Money is budgeted to continue the same work, in two phases, all the way down to the Seybold Canal. Badia says the next phases may commence as soon as the end of the year, but there's no guarantee.

More immediately, the Miami River Coordinating Committee is trying to rescue the creek. Its emphasis has been on the upper reaches and a very specific, one-square-mile area nearby. A multiagency task force has divided into groups to undertake specific tasks, including checking for illegal pipe connections to the creek, replacing antiquated pipes with new ones, boosting enforcement of city codes that govern waste disposal, and improving public education in the neighborhoods and schools to help cut back on littering and illegal waste disposal.

You need only a brief tour of Allapattah to clearly understand some of the reasons for Wagner Creek's degradation. And there may be no better guide than Sergio Guadix, the city's code enforcement inspector for the neighborhood, who estimates he's handed out more than 600 citations during the past two years. He heads straight for the wholesale produce market, twenty square blocks of warehouses between NW Twelfth and Seventeenth avenues that come alive every morning at about three o'clock and die off by eleven. Sidewalks and gutters are strewn with wilted vegetables and bruised fruit, as well as with crates and planks from freight pallets. Dumpsters overflow with the same. Some of this debris, Guadix says, will get pushed by hand or rainwater into the stormwater drainage system.

But the merchants aren't solely to blame for the mess. Guadix slowly drives his city-owned pick-up truck through the intersection of NW 22nd Street and Thirteenth Avenue. On the corner a man in tattered clothing and bare feet squats next to a couple of produce crates and peddles dubious-looking melons and avocados. Farther down the block two women are sleeping on the sidewalk under a blazing hot sun, one on an old mattress, the other stretched across three couch cushions. Similar tableaux of destitution are replicated on every block. Allapattah, Guadix explains, is an attractive place for the homeless to migrate. They get jobs helping unload boxes from produce trucks. In return they might get a couple of boxes to sell on their own. What they can't get rid of by morning's end they leave in the gutter, then for some it's off to score a rock of crack and a prostitute, both of which can be found in abundance in Allapattah.

"We were breaking our heads saying, 'Why do we have so much homelessness?'" Guadix remarks. "The reason is that everybody who gets arrested gets let off at the Dade County Jail ten blocks away and they come over here. They say, 'I've got food, drugs, sex here. I don't need to go anywhere.'"

The Miami River Coordinating Committee's task force and the attendant media coverage have helped correct the sloppy housekeeping by merchants and have corralled some of the homeless, says Guadix. "It's really clean now compared to how it usually is," he insists. But to the first-time visitor, the neighborhood looks a bit like Yasgur's farm post-Woodstock.

Not all of the neighborhood's deeper problems are readily apparent, though. "We have mostly absentee landlords -- the number's at about 60 percent, I think," Guadix continues. "That's why you have noncaring." And of course the pollution doesn't come only from the produce market: auto repair garages, fast-food joints, and private residences are among the creek's many sources of contamination. "In a way I'm glad that Wagner Creek is in that condition, because it's helped focus more attention on our problems," he says. "It's nasty to come to a place that's nasty."