FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – This week’s Don’t Trash Our Treasure is an update to a story we’ve been closely following: the pending expansion project at Port Everglades, which is necessary to bring the port into the modern era, but also potentially endangering millions of precious corals and other sensitive marine life.
With so much at stake, project managers and port officials are making sure plans and protocols are in place to protect the fragile surrounding habitat before the dredging begins.
“We can’t start this until all these environmental requirements are met, that’s 100% correct, and that’s what we’re working through now,” said Port Everglades Assistant Director David Anderton.
It is an ambitious $1.3 billion project to improve, deepen and widen Port Everglades.
“This is currently authorized today at 42 feet, and with the project moving forward, this will actually be deep into to a template of 50 feet,” said Anderton.
It’s a critical expansion originally greenlit by Broward County back in 2008 to make room for bigger and wider vessels.
“And it’s not cruise ships,” said Anderton. “It’s primarily cargo ships and also the petroleum tanker vessels that are getting larger. Some of our existing container operators have wanted to bring larger vessels into the port and they haven’t been able to do that because of the lack of depth.”
The project has been stalled by concerns over the environmental impact. At stake are millions of corals, many of them endangered, that are at risk of being lost forever.
Over the summer, Local 10 News’ Anchor Louis Aguirre joined a research team led by coral scientists from the Shedd Aquarium, surveying how many corals could potentially be impacted.
“Some of the last remaining staghorn corals now in Florida are here around Port Everglades, and so we need to protect those corals,” said Ross Cunning, a research biologist with the Shedd Aquarium.
In fact in 2013 when the Army Corps of Engineers deepened PortMiami, 278 acres of coral reef were decimated, smothered by sediment that was raised during the dredging.
“We saw what happened in Port Miami when these projects go wrong, millions of corals are killed and still never been fixed,” said Miami Waterkeeper Executive Director Rachel Silverstein. “There’s so much at stake here.”
But now the Army Corps of Engineers is determined to learn from past mistakes and will have tighter control over the contractors during the process.
“We know where the corals are,” said project manager Stephen Meyer. “So we have an adaptive management plan recalling it, which will allow us to change the process as we go through dredging, to take corrective action and prevent impacts to the corals as we do the dredging operations.”
Meyer showed Aguirre safety protocols already put in place to make sure the impact to the corals will be minimized.
The first step will be to move as many corals out of there and outplant them elsewhere.
“We’ve committed to remove every single one of those corals, whether they’re endangered or not,” said Meyer.
Corals that can’t be moved and saved will be mitigated.
With millions of corals at risk, Meyer calls it the largest coral mitigation project the Army Corps has ever attempted.
And it’s not just corals at risk: aggregation of endangered queen conch is also near the project footprint. Thousands of them.
“So the fact that those conch are here are really critical to our understanding of the potential risks to a dredging and what it could do to this population of illicit species,” said Silverstein.
There is a ton of scrutiny. In July, NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service notified the Army Corps that the project cannot proceed until they provide a complete analysis on the potential effects on species and critical habitat protected by the Endangered Species Act.
Meyer was asked how close they are to meeting those requirements.
“I’d say we’re closer than we’ve ever been,” he said.
In fact, mangrove mitigation has already advanced.
In one area of West Lake Park in Hollywood, the Army Corps created over three acres of maritime hammock with mangroves and mudflats, over 10,000 feet of living shoreline and 12 acres of seagrass.
“We can see one of the seagrass beds right here,” said Anderton.
With so much riding on this project, the Army Corps knows it has to get this right.
“We certainly recognize it, which is why we’re doing all the things that we’re doing in terms of minimization efforts, offsetting measures, monitoring, planning, everything we’re doing in order to make sure that we have a success here at Port Everglades,” said Meyer.
The projected start date for the dredging is now 2028 and should take eight to 10 years to complete. We’ll be watching.