Cracking the case of who smothered the Little Wekiva River

Folks living by the Little Wekiva started noticing something odd a couple of years ago, according to Jim Adamski, a Valencia College geology professor who’s president of Friends of the Wekiva River.

He remembers being at a dinner party where the hostess commented on “all the sand in the river, and how it hadn’t been there before.” Every time the subject came up after that, he said, people talked about how “the situation kept getting worse and worse.”

The sand kept flowing in and filling in the riverbed, displacing the water. By the end of 2019, Schreiber said, “you couldn’t get a motorboat through there, and by January 2020, you couldn’t even get a kayak through.”

Now the beloved waterway that once coursed through the neighborhood is gone. The sediment “filled every nook and cranny of the river,” Schreiber said.