Friday, March 14, 2014

Port Everglades dredging clears environmental hurdle

Federal scientists have decided the plan to dredge and widen the Port Everglades shipping channel would not harm endangered species or their habitat because it would replace and enhance thousands of corals and mangroves disrupted by dredging.

The project is expected to increase the port's volume and create 11,000 jobs by deepening the port's waterways to accommodate mega cargo ships that will sail through a widened Panama Canal. But it will also damage the environment near the entrance to the port, one of several roadblocks that have damaged attempts to secure federal funding for the project.

The dredging and widening will destroy 22 acres of coral reef habitat and may indirectly disturb another 118 acres of the ecosystem, according to fishery officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

But NOAA scientists concluded that the damage would be more than offset by a plan to build artificial reefs of boulders farther out to sea and up the coast and filling them with transplanted corals. The mitigation plan calls for moving 11,500 corals from the port entrance and adding another 35,000 to 50,000 that are grown in nurseries onshore.

This "innovative approach" will address "the unprecedented amount of impacts to coral reef and hard-bottom habitat and help allow the expansion of a major port," said Robert Moller, deputy director of legislative affairs at NOAA, told Florida members of Congress.

For more of the Sun Sentinel story: sun-sentinel.com


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