Some of the roads around Rock Pit Lake in Fort Lauderdale already get covered in water after heavy rains, no small matter in a city where rainfall this year has made it the wettest in America.
But now that the Florida Department of Environmental Protection has approved the lake owner’s plan to fill it in with concrete and other debris, residents are concerned their homes could be at even greater risk of flooding.
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That’s because the state, Broward County and the City of Fort Lauderdale all signed off on various aspects of the project without knowing how much water the lake receives from stormwater piped directly into it.
The plans were approved without anyone noticing it did not include a pipe that has for 42 years drained an adjacent 35-acre neighborhood’s stormwater directly into the lake – not until the NBC6 Investigators got involved.
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Without accounting for that outflow, there’s fear among residents that the pipe will be cut off – causing water to back up into their homes -- a prospect a county engineer told NBC6 the county “doesn’t take lightly.”
But now that the state, county and city have approved the lake-fill project, it’s unclear whether any of them can compel the landowner to accommodate the pipe, which is fed by a series of connected drains that runs a third of a mile east into the Golden Heights neighborhood just southeast of the lake, city records show.
Investigations
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The owner of the lake and surrounding property, now known as RPL Land LLC, and its engineer submitted applications stating there was no connection to the lake found there, and it stated those drains, along NW 16th Street, were not all connected to each other feeding into the lake.
In preparing stormwater calculations submitted with an application needed to fill the lake, the engineering firm, Geosyntec Consultants, excluded that neighborhood, which comprises about 35 acres, from the area that contributes stormwater to the lake.
But after the NBC6 Investigators revealed discrepancies between the applications and other public records, the City of Fort Lauderdale confirmed there is in fact a drainage pipe there. Drawings show nearly 1,800 feet of pipe connect the drains to the lake. Broward County contracted for that work in 1980, before the area was annexed into the city.
Several calls and emails from NBC6 to Geosyntec engineers have gone unanswered.
The owner of the lake has repeatedly declined to comment on the matter.
And the state Department of Environmental Protection has for months failed to answer all questions posed to it about the process, though it claimed in August it would soon respond to NBC6. Recent inquiries to DEP have been ignored.
DEP approved the plan in 2021 to fill the lake as part of a program designed to protect the environment from contaminated lakes. Rock Pit Lake is adjacent to a long-closed city landfill and incinerator and has been a concern of state and federal environmental agencies.
RPL Land LLC now has approval to dump clean concrete and fill into the 28-acre lake that is in places 60 feet deep. It could take 100,000 typical dump truck loads before it fills up.
In its surface water management license application to voluntarily turn the parcel into a wetland, RPL Land LLC’s engineer, Geosyntec, said it would manage offsite runoff from storm pipes at the north and northwest of the lake – but said it found no connection on the southeast corner, where the pipe from Golden Heights exists.
Broward Country said it is now investigating whether there is any permit, license or easement that allowed any of those pipes to feed the lake. If not, the county said, the landowner may not have been compelled to accept any of the runoff and the application may have been approved anyway.
But that was before the Golden Heights connection was confirmed.
As NBC6 reported in August, the application also stated an eight-acre paved parcel to the northwest of the lake did not connect to a drain that is piped directly into the lake, so it too was excluded from the contributing area in the application. But a city record states they are connected.
The engineer for the owner of that parcel, Florida Power and Light, has told the county the drainage connection has been disconnected, but the city has not yet confirmed that. A city spokeswoman told NBC6 that a video camera will be deployed into the drainage pipe in the coming weeks to determine if it is connected, as city records state.
After about a foot of rain fell in the area last week, that drain on the northwest corner on NW 17th Court did not appear to be draining at all into the lake, and the roadway around it was inundated with water, while the FPL parcel appeared dry. The county said it will now ask the city to investigate whether that drain is working properly.
