STUART - A special appearance by the director of the South Florida Water Management on a dry day, in a dry year, drew no more than the usual three or four dozen to Wednesday evening's meeting of the Rivers Coalition. Attendance would have been very different, said Coalition member Karl Wickstrom, during an especially wet season.

"If it had been 2005," he said, "you couldn't get a seat in here."

Heavy rains that year led to massive releases of polluted water from Lake Okeechobee that were shunted through the C-24 canal into the St. Lucie and Indian rivers. Phosphorus in the water caused harmful algae blooms and fish kills.

Reducing discharges through the canal is a goal of the Everglades restoration plan, which Water Management Director Melissa Meeker presented to the group. The massive, long-term effort was created to bring the flow of water through the lower half of the state as close as possible to its natural roots.

The first phase focused on slowing water flow into Lake Okeechobee by restoring the natural curves of the Kissimmee River and creating reservoirs to hold water near the lake.

"We're storing more water on the land," Meeker said.

The second major objective of Everglades Restoration is bringing water from the lake south, back into the heart of the Everglades, which acts like a natural sponge. That phase has been slowed by drained agricultural land between the lake and the Everglades.

The one improvement the coalition most wanted was one Meeker couldn't deliver. A drought in recent years has spared local rivers from polluting discharges. But they're bound to return during a wet season. The Army Corps of Engineers holds down water levels in the lake to prevent a major break in the aging dike should a hurricane strike. Repairs to the dike are expected to continue for many years.

"Until we fix the dike," Meeker said, "we're still going to have discharges."

That worries Rivers Coalition members, who fear a wet season will not only bring polluted water into the rivers, but also stir up contaminants that have settled in the bottom.

"The sediment issue is an impending nightmare," member George Jones said. "When we have another wet season, we'll have another disaster."

Mark Perry, director of Florida Oceanographic Society, urged members to inform others about the river quality and the threat from lake discharges.

"Tell people this is way the estuary always should look," he said.

Mark Perry has an assignment for us:

Go outside.

Hop in a boat or stand at the shore of the St. Lucie River.

"Watch the mullet jumping, and just feel Florida," said Perry, executive director of Florida Oceanographic Society.

Enjoy the relative health of the river while you can.

After a parched dry season, the rainy season is only a month or so away. If it's a particularly wet one, we can brace ourselves for more Health Department warnings and algae outbreaks on the St. Lucie River.

As optimistic as leaders of the South Florida Water Management District are about restoration projects along the Kissimmee River and elsewhere, they won't eliminate the perennial threat to the St. Lucie River - damaging releases from Lake Okeechobee.

"There's going to come a time when that water's going to rise and we have no capacity to move it south," Perry said.

When lake water rises and the Army Corps of Engineers starts getting nervous about the aging dike around Lake O, it will dump the water west to the Caloosahatchee River and east to the St. Lucie.

The Kissimmee River restoration project won't change that.

The C-44 Reservoir project on the St. Lucie Canal won't change that.

And there's no guarantee that a new, widely praised Everglades planning initiative will change that.

The Central Everglades Planning Project - led by the Army Corps with help from the South Florida Water Management District - aims to tag a group of restoration projects for congressional authorization within two years.

The goal: to send more water south to the central Everglades, Everglades National Park and Florida Bay (sparing the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee).

The catch: the restoration projects must be done on land already owned by the public.

That falls short for Karl Wickstrom, the founder of Florida Sportsman magazine who with Perry is a member of the Rivers Coalition advocacy group.

Wickstrom hopes water managers will exercise their option to buy another 153,000 acres south of Lake Okeechobee from U.S. Sugar Corp. - part of a controversial deal proposed by former Gov. Charlie Crist. Nine years are left on that option.

"The public is solidly for a cleanup, but they just don't have a vehicle because most of the politicians and bureaucrats are compromised," Wickstrom said.

Another member of the Rivers Coalition, Ted Guy Jr., is slightly more optimistic about the Central Everglades Planning Project. He hopes it includes a way to move water south from Lake Okeechobee into the Miami River Canal and the North New River Canal.

But it's not clear how much water those canals can move - or how much more they could handle if they were expanded. Guy has been asking that question for months.

Scientists are researching those numbers now, said Melissa Meeker, executive director of the South Florida Water Management District.

Meeker, who had been on the job 300 days, painted a picture of progress when she spoke Wednesday to the Rivers Coalition at Stuart City Hall.

She pointed to the amount of water being stored on private land around the state and the progress along the Kissimmee River.

Her audience wanted assurances about the St. Lucie River that she couldn't provide.

"There's an awful lot of lip service to solving the problem, but mainly I think they're trying to protect the (Everglades Agricultural Area) and the agricultural water supply and the utility water supply and the golf course water supply," Guy said.

To that point, an alliance of environmental groups just launched a TV ad warning residents that "summer slime" season is coming.

With ominous music playing, the Florida Water Coalition spot declares:

"The recent slew of toxic algae blooms are caused by industrial polluters, sewage, manure, fertilizer. Floridians like to boat, fish and swim in clean water - but our politicians keep protecting polluters."

The St. Lucie River is free of those algae blooms at the moment.

Enjoy it while you can.

Eve Samples is a columnist for Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers. This column reflects her opinion. Contact her at 772-221-4217 or eve.samples@scripps.com.