Florida Spent Decades Draining the Everglades — Now Collier County Is Putting the Water Back

COLLIER COUNTY, Fla. — For generations, Florida engineers faced one overriding challenge: how do you get rid of all this water?

They dug canals. They built roads and levees. They installed pumps. And across South Florida, enormous areas of wetlands were drained to make room for agriculture and development.

Now, in a remarkable reversal, engineers have spent years doing almost the opposite.

They’re plugging canals, tearing out old roads and trying to make water move slowly across the landscape again.

And one of the biggest examples of this environmental U-turn is right here in Collier County.

🌿 The Failed Development That Changed Southwest Florida

The story begins in the 1960s with an ambitious development called Southern Golden Gate Estates.

Developers carved a massive grid of roads and drainage canals through more than 85 square miles of wetlands between what are now Alligator Alley and Tamiami Trail.

The plan was enormous residential development.

Much of it never happened.

But the roads and canals remained.

Those canals continued doing exactly what they had been designed to do: drain water away from the wetlands.

Over time, the drainage altered groundwater levels, wetland habitat and the natural movement of freshwater toward the Ten Thousand Islands and nearby coastal ecosystems.

The area eventually became the focus of one of Southwest Florida’s largest environmental restoration projects.

💧 The Picayune Strand Restoration Project

The Picayune Strand Restoration Project covers approximately 55,000 acres of wetlands and uplands in Collier County.

The project is part of the larger Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan.

Its goal sounds surprisingly simple:

Put the water back where nature originally intended it to go.

Getting there required a huge engineering effort.

According to the South Florida Water Management District and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the project involved removing roughly 260 miles of old roads, plugging about 48 miles of canals and constructing three major pump stations.

After decades of construction and restoration work, officials celebrated completion of the project in January 2026 at the Miller Pump Station in Naples.

In other words, something remarkable has happened just inland from Naples and Marco Island:

Florida has deliberately dismantled part of the drainage system that earlier generations spent enormous effort constructing.

🌊 Why Plug a Canal?

A canal moves water efficiently.

That’s exactly the problem when you’re trying to restore a wetland.

Before extensive drainage, rainwater moved gradually through Southwest Florida’s wetlands. Instead of immediately disappearing down a canal, water spread across the landscape in shallow sheets.

Hydrologists call this sheet flow.

That slow movement of freshwater helps sustain wetlands, recharge groundwater and provide habitat for native wildlife.

Canals can short-circuit that system.

Rather than water slowly spreading through wetlands, canals can collect it and rapidly carry it away.

So engineers have plugged sections of the old canals to reduce that drainage.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says the restoration is designed to reestablish natural water flow across an area that had been dramatically altered by the failed development.

🐊 What Does This Have to Do With Naples and Marco Island?

Quite a lot.

Picayune Strand sits immediately upstream of some of Southwest Florida’s most environmentally important areas.

Restoring the wetlands is expected to improve water movement toward Collier-Seminole State Park, the Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge and the Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve.

That makes this more than an Everglades story.

It’s a Collier County water story.

Restoring natural hydrology can improve groundwater recharge and reduce the unnatural concentration of freshwater flowing through drainage canals into coastal estuaries.

The project is also intended to help protect the eastern Golden Gate wellfield serving Naples by improving groundwater recharge.

🐆 Wildlife Gets Its Wetlands Back

There is another major beneficiary: wildlife.

Picayune Strand provides habitat for numerous native species, including the Florida panther.

Restoring seasonal wetlands creates healthier habitat for fish, birds, reptiles and mammals while reconnecting ecosystems fragmented by decades of roads and drainage infrastructure.

The South Florida Water Management District says anticipated benefits include improved wildlife habitat, increased groundwater levels, reduced drainage of neighboring ecosystems, improved aquifer recharge and reduced saltwater intrusion.

There’s even a manatee component.

Changing flows from the Faka Union Canal required construction of a special manatee refuge, because manatees had become accustomed to warm-water conditions associated with canal flows.

It demonstrates just how complicated reversing decades of human alteration can become.

🚜 Hundreds of Miles of Roads Removed

Perhaps the most visually astonishing part of the project isn’t the canals.

It’s the roads.

Satellite imagery of Southern Golden Gate Estates once showed an enormous geometric grid sliced through the wilderness.

Much of that grid has now been dismantled.

More than 260 miles of roads were removed, along with dozens of miles of old logging tram roads.

Removing them matters because roads can behave like miniature dams, blocking water from moving naturally across wetlands.

The objective is to reconnect the landscape so water can once again spread through the ecosystem instead of being confined by human-built barriers.

🌀 But Florida Isn’t Getting Rid of All Its Canals

That’s an important distinction.

South Florida still depends heavily on canals, levees, pumps and water-control structures.

They protect homes and businesses from flooding, provide water supplies and help manage enormous amounts of rainfall during Florida’s wet season and tropical storms.

The Picayune Strand project therefore isn’t simply about “getting rid of canals.”

It is about removing or modifying infrastructure where drainage caused ecological damage while maintaining flood protection for surrounding developed and agricultural areas.

Three large pump stations and a protection levee are part of the restoration system for exactly that reason.

Engineers aren’t abandoning water management.

They’re redesigning it.

🌎 Florida’s Great Environmental Reversal

There is something extraordinary about the history behind this project.

A century ago, draining wetlands was widely considered progress.

Water was viewed as something that needed to be removed so land could become useful.

Today we understand that those wetlands were doing valuable work themselves — storing water, supporting wildlife, replenishing aquifers and maintaining the delicate balance between freshwater and saltwater along Florida’s coast.

Picayune Strand may be one of the clearest examples anywhere in Florida of that change in thinking.

We dug canals to drain the land.

We built roads across the wetlands.

We changed where the water went.

And decades later, after seeing the consequences, we spent years taking much of it apart.

In January 2026, the restoration reached a major milestone when federal and state officials officially celebrated completion of the 55,000-acre Picayune Strand Restoration Project.

For residents of Marco Island and Naples, this isn’t some distant Everglades restoration project happening on the other side of Florida.

It’s happening in our backyard.

And after more than half a century, part of Collier County is finally being allowed to behave like a wetland again.