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BONITA SPRINGS — Lake Okeechobee is filling up, and there’s only one place for the water to go.

Actually, there are two places — the Caloosahatchee River and the St. Lucie canal. Both are full.

That’s the same situation that occurred in 2004 and 2005, when blasts of polluted water from the lake washed down the Caloosahatchee and spawned algae blooms and devastated estuaries here.

Things have gotten better since. Low lake levels during the intervening drought allowed the removal of tons of muck from the lake bottom, and the re-emergence of lake vegetation has resulted in cleaner water.

The lake management schedule has also changed, with levels between 12.5 feet and 15.5 feet now the target. The lake level was at 14.13 feet Friday morning and continuing to rise.

What hasn’t changed is where the water will go.

“Nothing structural has changed,” said Rae Ann Wessel, natural resources policy director for the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation. “There’s been a lot of discussion and there’s been a lot of planning.”

In Lee County, officials say that 4,500 cubic feet per second, or cfs, is the maximum that can flow down the Caloosahatchee without harming the estuaries and the river itself. On Friday, the flow was at 11,000 cfs.

That’s bad, said county natural resource director Roland Ottolini.

“We’re already in deep,” he said.

It could get worse, and soon.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spokesman Barry Vorse said the agency wants to start releasing 3,000 cfs into the Caloosahatchee — and 1,170 cfs into the St. Lucie — one day next week.

“We continue to receive rainfall in the basin and we have continuous flows in the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie,” Vorse said. “There are a lot of variables. We have Hanna out there and we have other systems behind that one.”

In fact, the lake has risen faster over the past seven days than any week in history. The Corps is carefully watching the dike that protects communities south of the lake, and could start “low level” releases next week, Vorse said.

Ottolini said that the freshwater flushing down the river has already damaged saltwater grass beds.

“The philosophy that’s been expressed before was that, well, you’re already being harmed,” he said. “This creates a huge freshwater plume into the saltwater, and it’s not the cleanest. It’s nutrient-laden. We can expect algae blooms to follow.”

The water coming down the river now is also polluted, carrying nutrients and contaminants from all over the watershed.

“Regardless of where it comes from, it affects the estuaries,” Wessel said. “We don’t just look at the lake and say, ‘It’s all their fault.’”

What the current dilemma underscores, Ottolini and Wessel both said, is the need for long-term solutions. More storage areas are needed, and the southern flow-way can’t come quick enough.

That depends on the $1.75 billion U.S. Sugar buyout, said Lee County smart growth director Wayne Daltry.

“There are 10,000 ways that can go wrong and one way to do it right,” he said. “But what it tells us is there can be an end to this.”

But not right away. Any southern flow-way is years — perhaps decades — away. Lake releases could begin next week.