Officials broke ground on a water treatment facility for the Caloosahatchee River this week.

Construction of the Caloosahatchee Basin Treatment Facility in Hendry County is now underway. Once it’s done, it will clean out some of the nutrient pollution in the river using new technology.

Rich Budell with Florida’s Agriculture Department said overall water quality will improve, but he’s not sure residents of Lee County who live along the river will notice a difference.

“Certainly there will be measurable differences in the water quality—the inflow versus the outflow of the system and we will be absolutely able to quantify how much phosphorus and nitrogen the system is removing,” he said.

Area runoff and resulting nutrient pollution has been to blame for unsightly and often smelly algal blooms. However, this summer releases from Lake Okeechobee have added to the problem.

Jennifer Hecker with the Conservancy of Southwest Florida said the new facility probably won’t be able to deal with those pollutants, but it’s a step in the right direction.

“It’s not going to be able to address the very high flows coming from the Lake entirely in and of itself,” Hecker explained. “But it is an important step towards dealing with the problem of diverting those flows and cleansing out the pollutants that are fouling our river and our estuary.”

Hecker said releasing water south and cleaning up point source pollution would improve the Caloosahatchee’s water quality more.