But for 135 years, Mother Nature has confounded these engineers in what has become an epic chess match.

Faced with adverse unintended consequences of earlier moves, succeeding generations of engineers built higher and wider levees, more canals and even reservoirs in a vain effort to defy 6,000 years of natural order and keep the shallow, 730-square-mile lake in its bed during the kind of heavy rains and stiff winds Florida is famous for, the kind that can whip up an angry, powerful, southerly surge in the lake bed that, if it were to rupture the dike, would unleash the force and fury of a great tsunami plunging downhill through a naked basin of farm fields and small towns.

Mother Nature let it be known from the start that tampering with her wouldn’t be easy. Shortly after the first canal was put into service in 1881, water released from the lake flooded property along the Caloosahatchee River, drawing protests from land owners.

In 1926, a hurricane ruptured the dike, killing 300 people.

Two years later, another hurricane burst the dike, this time killing at least 2,500. Many bodies were washed into the Everglades never to be found, some likely devoured by alligators or picked at by turkey vultures – or perhaps worked on by other scavengers and decomposers of the glades. In any case, they were absorbed one way or the other into the muck of the swamp itself. Some recovered bodies were interred anonymously in mass graves.

In her 1937 novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” novelist, folklorist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston drew on her full pallet of skills to conjure the horror endured by migrant workers washed away by the hurricane of 1928, many of them, like herself, the children of slaves, but all of them without warning or means of escape – offering a hint of what might yet lie in store for residents of modern-day towns like Clewiston, Belle Glade and Pahokee.

“A huge barrier of the makings of the dike to which the cabins had been added was rolling and tumbling forward,” she wrote. “Ten feet higher and as far as they could see the muttering wall advanced before the braced-up waters like a road crusher on a cosmic scale. The monstropolous beast had left its bed…. The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel.”

In 1947, a hurricane-driven surge topped the dike, causing extensive damage to agriculture and widespread loss of livestock and wildlife, but no human deaths.

The current state of the effort to keep the “monstropolous beast” confined to its bed is a sprawling, jerry-rigged plumbing system consisting of 2,100 miles of canals, 2,000 miles of levees and 71 major pumping stations.