Second Chance for a Dying Estuary - The monumental task of restoring the Everglades begins 100 miles to the north.

FROM ENCOUNTERS with alligators and downed aircraft to surprised tourists who've seen her and various family members crawling out of the swamp, Maggy Hurchalla has plenty to tell her grandson about her escapades in the Everglades--a place where she's been lost more times than she can count on both hands. But what she doesn't anticipate talking to him about as they peer into South Florida's Indian River is why the fish swimming past are covered with red lesions. "What do you say to a five-year-old then?" she asks, standing on the same dock a few years later.

It wasn't the first time that Hurchalla, a member of the Governor's Commission for a Sustainable South Florida and former Martin County commissioner from 1974 to 1994, had witnessed Florida's environment revolt against the abuses heaved on it. "With the fish, the scream was just more dramatic," she says. "And it's a good thing or we might have ignored the problems again."

Although more than 100 miles north of Everglades National Park, the Indian River Lagoon estuary is part of the historic saw grass slough-- the so-called river of grass that in post-World War II America the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers paved, drained, blocked and channeled withwidespread approval. The result: an ecosystem in collapse. Now a novel plan that has everyone--the Corps, the South Florida Water Management District, agricultural interests and environmentalists--in agreement just might give the nation's most biodiverse estuary a fighting chance. And…