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Two $10 million reservoirs built by the South Florida Water Management District in Hendry County are only about six weeks old but they've already paid for themselves, experts said Friday.

The district built the reservoirs to act as models to aid in the design and construction of the massive C-43 Reservoir. When it is complete in 2011, the reservoir will help experts regulate harmful freshwater releases from Lake Okeechobee.

The 28-acre models, which each hold the equivalent of 45 Olympic-sized pools full of water, did their job by teaching engineers the best way to store water above ground and minimize the amount of water that seeps out.

In the 11,000-acre C-43 reservoir, seepage could cost the district millions of dollars to mitigate and damage the integrity of the dam's walls, said Kevin Aubry, senior geotechnical engineer for Dunkelberger Engineering & Testing, Inc.

"We feel like we've paid for the (model) project in savings for the big reservoir," Aubry said.

By building the models in two different ways, the district found that one held water about 10 times better than the other, he said.

The district also designed the models to learn about water quality. But collecting that information will take several months, said Agnes Ramsey, assistant to the program director for the water management district.

The district is monitoring water samples in an attempt to control pollutants that would enter the C-43 reservoir from Lake Okeechobee and the basin's stormwater runoff.

"Right now we're not even sure what the problem is, much less figure out how to address it," Ramsey said.

The model reservoirs will help experts determine what happens to nutrients in stagnant water and the best way to manage it, Ramsey said. It could settle to the bottom, or it could contribute to algae growth.

The C-43 Reservoir will be built without a water treatment plant, meaning polluted water that enters the reservoir will be returned to the Caloosatchee estuary when it is released.

That is one area where the project fails to address one of Lee County's most important concerns, said Commissioner Ray Judah.

"This is going to be an incubator for blue-green algae," said Judah after touring the test cells.

To thrive, algae need calm water, warm temperatures and nutrients, all of which will be found in the C-43 reservoir, Judah said.

The district needs to spend its time and money building storage and restoring the traditional flowway to the south of Lake Okeechobee, where the sugar industry controls much of the land, Judah said.

"You have to look at the irony of converting valuable agricultural land to the west of the lake into water storage while south of the lake, valuable wetlands are converted for agriculture," he said.

The C-43 reservoir will address one of the major problems the Caloosahatchee estuary faces, which is the sheer volume of water that it receives from basin runoff and Lake Okeechobee releases, Ramsey said.

When the reservoir is complete, it will hold 170,000 acre-feet of water, or the equivalent of 79,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. The district will build the reservoir on 11,000 acres of agricultural land east of LaBelle.

The C-43 Reservoir is part the Governor's Acceler8 program, which advances the pace of funding, design and construction of eight Everglades restoration projects. The program provides an additional 418,000 acre-feet of storage for Lake Okeechobee runoff a decade ahead of time.

Anytime there is more storage in the ground it is beneficial to Lee County," said Kurt Harclerode, a water quality specialist for Lee's Department of Natural Resources.

The Army Corps of Engineers has discussed building a water quality facility at the C-43 Reservoir, but first more information must be collected about the pollution problem, Ramsey said.

As the water management district collects those data, Lee County will be there to review them, said commissioner Tammy Hall.

"We want to really follow that data so every month we can look at it with them so we are part of the decisions," Hall said. "We want decisions driven by science, not emotion. We have to have good science to make good decisions."