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Given their dedication to throwing money at the Atlantic Ocean until it rearranges itself to their satisfaction, one doesn't expect Boca Raton's beach renourishment gang to balk at the exploitation of a few absent sea turtles.

On the other hand, the glee with which they called a news conference on Monday to announce that the city's sea-turtle hatchery had succumbed to weekend storms and tumbled into the ocean off south beach was maybe just a tad obvious.

I mean, cartwheels in the surf?

Not that they weren't, um, what? Dismayed? Yes, that's it. They were dismayed about the storm damage.

But by golly, Dolly, talk about fantastic timing!

Aren't top officials from the Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers meeting this very day in Atlanta to discuss the city's plans to widen the beach along a 1.45-mile stretch of Spanish River Park? Of course they are. And hasn't the federal agency, questioning the extent of erosion the city beaches have suffered, been opposed to corps plans to approve the $7.1 million project? Of course it has.

And won't this wanton destruction of the sea turtle hatchery show how wrong and pigheaded and dumb and stupid and chucklebrained this opposition has been? You betcha.

"This would not have happened if we had done the renourishment project this summer," said Rick Wolf, the city's chief environmental officer.

"It's kind of symbolic," added Rick Spadoni, the coastal engineer who has been lending moral and technical support to city officials in their holy quest for sand.


And even as he spoke, Spadoni made hasty arrangements to videotape this latest outrage on the part of Mother Nature and send it to Atlanta via an overnight mail service so that corps and agency officials can view the damages during today's deliberations.

Naturally I didn't see the videotape before it left, but I imagine it is based on a theme similar to those magazine advertisements in which Paul Newman alternates with Sally Struthers in displaying the poignant snapshot of an ill- clad child with tangled hair and tear-stained cheeks who will continue to suffer abject poverty for want of a $3 per month contribution from the reader of the magazine: You can help this child. Or you can turn the page.

You can help these sea turtles. Or you can pull the plug on this video.

Never mind that the sea turtles have long since ceased nesting for the season and won't be back until next year when, according to opponents of beach renourishment, so will the sand.

"A naturally functioning beach system comes and goes," said Leah Schad, chairwoman for the Florida Audubon Society. "The sand will come back. It's not even turtle season. Next year, when the turtles need the sand, it will be there."

And never mind, too, that the hatchery isn't even on the section of north beach that's supposed to be widened. The idea here, if I understand the propaganda correctly, is similar to the "trickle-down" theory of economics. In this case, the sand from the projected renourishment of the north beach is expected to "drift south" and eventually widen the south beach, too.

Or, who knows? Maybe we hope that federal officials don't know one end of the beach from the other.

What a difference just a few billion dollars would make to this sea turtle!


Meanwhile, continuation of the turtle-egg protection program mandates replacement of the 20-foot-by-40-foot metal enclosure that constitutes the hatchery, and why something like that should cost $4,000 is beyond me, but that's what Wolf said. Then they'll have to nail the sign up again that designates the location as a sea turtle hatchery which, being as how it's only tax dollars, let's estimate at another $4,000.

So there's $8,000 right there, and if that isn't a textbook illustration of the proverbial drop in the bucket, what is? I mean, the Atlantic Ocean runs to 33,420,000 square miles and to an average depth of 12,257 feet, for heaven's sake. As far as I'm concerned, that puts it in the same category with a 600- pound gorilla.

It can sit wherever it wants to.

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