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BONITA SPRINGS — Officials with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided Tuesday not to start releasing water from Lake Okeechobee to flow down the Caloosahatchee River.

But Wednesday is another day.

Steve Duba, the Army Corps Jacksonville district chief of engineering, said the Corps is continuing to monitor lake levels, river flows and tropical weather, and could start releases Wednesday.

The lake level was at 14.6 feet Tuesday and the target is 121⁄2 feet to 151⁄2 feet. The flow in the Caloosahatchee was 6,528 cubic feet per second. The target — the flow known to damage the estuaries if exceeded for a week — is 4,500 cubic feet per second.

On Monday the flow was 12,000 cubic feet per second.

“We’re just starting to get capacity in the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie (rivers),” Duba said. “We don’t want to exacerbate flooding downstream unless we’re in an emergency, and we’re nowhere near that right now.”

Duba said the Corps could start low-level releases, likely 3,000 cubic feet per second. That would only slow the rise of the lake, which in the week after Tropical Storm Fay rose by nearly 3 feet, more than at any other time in recorded history.

John Vediak, chief of water management for the Jacksonville district, said the Corps might not consider releases at the current lake level if tropical storms weren’t lined up in the Atlantic Ocean.

“With the storms out there it’s an appropriate time to make a release,” he said. “If the storms were not there maybe we don’t release.”

Tropical Storm Fay — which hit Southwest Florida on Aug. 19 — was in excess of a 100-year rainfall event, Zediak said.

“Fay was kind of a monster as far as lake level rise,” he said.

Herbert Hoover Dike inspections continue, Duba said, some on a daily basis. The Corps doesn’t consider the lake level an emergency until it reaches 17.25 feet, he said, but no releases can drain the lake as fast as it can fill.

Lee County smart growth director Wayne Daltry said that any release will sound the death knell for seagrasses that have struggled to return during the past two dry years.

“The system can’t accommodate 4,500 cubic feet per second for over a week,” he said. “We’ve blown that. It’ll push back any recovery for yet another year. I know it’s coffee-colored. That’s enough light blocked so anything coming back would be wiped out.”

Daltry also noted that the South Florida Water Management District has cancelled meetings of its Water Resources Advisory Committee that were to take place in Fort Myers this week. They’ve been rescheduled in West Palm Beach.

“Anything to keep from being here when they start releases,” he said.