Kissimmee River

The Kissimmee River was straightened by engineers and then, decades later, deliberately bent back. It once meandered about 103 miles from Lake Kissimmee to Lake Okeechobee through a floodplain up to two miles wide, flooding it for months each year and feeding the wetlands that made it one of Florida's great waterfowl grounds. It is the head of the Everglades system, the start of the water that eventually reaches Florida Bay. After floods in the late 1940s, the Army Corps of Engineers dug a straight canal between 1962 and 1971, 56 miles long and about 30 feet deep, known as C-38. The canal drained the floodplain almost at once. Tens of thousands of acres of wetland dried out, wading birds and ducks largely disappeared, and the oxbows of the old river went stagnant. Calls to undo the project began almost as soon as it was finished. In 1992 Congress authorized a restoration, and over the following decades the Corps filled in about 22 miles of the canal it had dug and let the river return to about 44 miles of its old winding channel. The project was declared complete in 2021, one of the largest river restorations ever attempted. The river has responded. Flow returned to the old channel, the floodplain began to flood again, and wading birds, ducks and fish have come back in numbers that had not been seen in decades.