FL - Dredging is killing Florida corals; urge restoration now | Opinion
As the last remaining corals on Florida’s reefs circle the drain of a heating ocean, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has issued a report that reminds us of another coral disaster.
The massive “Deep Dredge” of PortMiami, between 2013 and 2015, promised to turn Miami into a major shipping center for giant, post-Panamax ships. It also devastated a most precious natural resource — likely killing millions of corals. Most of the damage has never been fixed. I say “most” because we did manage, after five years of litigation against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to get 10,000 staghorn corals restored.
After the Deep Dredge concluded, the dredging company’s environmental-monitoring firm claimed, in the face of insurmountable evidence to the contrary, that the dredging had killed only six corals. But I’d been diving on those reefs during the dredging. I’d seen the moonscape of dead, sediment-smothered corals stretching for miles in every direction. I’d witnessed our reefs — which had formed the living architecture of a teeming ecosystem that had thrived for millennia — blanch lifeless beneath the weight of millions of pounds of dredging offal.
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More:
Congress: Take urgent action to save Florida coral from imminent death | Opinion
NFWF Announces $1.3 Million in Grants to Support Coral Reefs, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation / September 19, 2023
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I enlisted UM scientists in a reanalysis of the monitoring firm’s data. Our analysis, published in in Marine Pollution Bulletin, proved the project had killed at least 560,000 corals, including scores of endangered species.
We sent our article to all the government agencies involved. We sat through endless meetings and sent meticulously researched letters. But it’s now been the better part of a decade and still no enforcement action has been taken.
This month that all changed. After seven years, NOAA confirmed our findings. NOAA determined that dredging destroyed at least 278 acres of reef. Yet, nearly a decade after the disaster at PortMiami, the Army Corps is proposing new dredging projects: in Puerto Rico, Fort Lauderdale — and in PortMiami again.
