The Tamiami Trail was once seen as an engineering marvel, but efforts to conquer the swamp and control water flow changed the Everglades forever. The Everglades is a vast system of interconnected rivers, lakes, and wetlands across south Florida that once extended from the Orlando area to Florida Bay, with a wide, shallow, slow-moving sheet of water flowing from Lake Okeechobee across the southern part of the state. Today that flow has slowed to a trickle, half of the original ecosystem is gone, and what remains is crossed by canals, irrigation ditches, and water control devices that divert water before it reaches Everglades National Park. The Everglades has been dredged, diked, and drained to near extinction, and the Tamiami Trail blocks water flow in the Shark River slough as effectively as a dam. The goal now is to restore a more natural flow of water through the remaining ecosystem and improve the water quality, quantity, timing, and distribution needed to revive wetland habitats in Everglades National Park. One step is raising the Tamiami Trail with a series of bridges to reestablish the sheet flow of water blocked by the road for more than 80 years, a complex effort requiring cooperation among federal, state, and local agencies and interest groups.