Last Updated: 4:47 p.m.
Backed by GPS data, photographs, and eyewitness accounts from the ground and from a fishing vessel, four people–two of them key advocates of the beach renourishment project ongoing in Flagler Beach, two of them fishing-vessel owners–are warning in dire terms that the dredging of over 1 million cubic yards of sand from the sea bottom several miles offshore is raking up live sea life and getting dangerously close to damaging or destroying a unique fishing ground.
“This is the live bottom we’re talking about,” Haley Stephens, co-owner of the charter fishing vessel Sea Spirit, told the Flagler Beach City Commission Thursday, referring to a designated zone about 11 miles offshore known as the Flagler Grounds and marked on all fishing maps for years–but not on any of the project’s environmental assessments. “We cannot recreate it. If it is destroyed, it is destroyed. This will not be able to be fixed.”
Stephens and Jimmy Hull of Hull’s Seafood in Ormond Beach, who fishes the Flagler Grounds, gathered data and photographs of dredging’s effects on the grounds and of the proximity of the dredging vessel to the grounds, placing it at 1 mile earlier this week. Haley Stevens provided what appeared to be solid proof of a quarter-mile proximity of the dredging vessel from the live fishing grounds. Hull alerted Flagler Beach attorney Dennis Bayer, who alerted County Attorney Al Hadeed and got in contact with Jason Harrah, the Corps’ project manager. At the same time, Carla Cline witnessed live sea life landing on the beach from the dredge pipes, and getting devoured there this week.
These are not Greenpeace-minded environmentalists seeking to stop the project. Bayer and Cline were active supporters and enablers of the beach renourishment project–more so than most: they were especially instrumental in securing numerous easements from homeowners along the renourishment area. Cline raised some $40,000 to help convince some of the reluctant land owners. Bayer, an attorney, worked through the legalities, all in parallel (but not intersecting) efforts with the county’s own work to secure easements from 140 property owners. So Bayer’s and Cline’s concern should not be confused with opposition (nor should Stephens’s or Hull’s)–only with their other long-standing record of environmental advocacy.
“We’re not trying to shut anything down, we’re not trying to cast blame, we’re just trying to get them to address the situation,” Bayer said today. He’d had productive conversations today with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ counsel, and said he was “encouraged by the tone of the response and the conversations that we had.” The corps is receptive to getting more information, checking with its biologists and continuing the conversation to ensure that concerns are addressed.
Bayer–a marine biologist before he went to law school–brought the matter to the attention of the Flagler Beach City Commission Thursday with Cline and Stevens at his side, a day after alerting Commission Chair Scott Spradley.
“The critical thing about the Flagler fishing grounds is, it’s one of the most thriving red snapper breeding grounds off the coast,” Bayer said. “And when I say it’s live bottom, it’s not the type of coral that you see like in the Keys. It’s what we call soft corals. They’re soft corals, sponges, sea fans. Bayer himself has fished, dived there, caught lobsters there. “From what I can tell from latest information that we just received this afternoon, a lot of the dredge site is less than a mile from the reef,” Bayer said. From tat close proximity, and from Hull’s observations, it’s impacting the fishing grounds.
“Also this week, I’ve been getting calls about an extraordinary number of shells, live shells that are being pumped up on the beach and being buried under the sand,” Bayer continued. “When Carla and I initially got involved with the project, we asked the county: is this going to be clean sand, and I guess there’s a definition of clean sand.” The number of live shells getting dumped on the beach suggests otherwise. “We’re not here to shut down the dredge project or oppose the dredge project. We’re only trying to get some answers.”
The Army Corps of Engineers is overseeing the project. It issued a statement through Jason Harrah, the project manager, on Thursday that reiterated the history of environmental assessments conducted and reviewed by several state and federal agencies. “The dredging and beach placement for the Flagler County [Coastal Storm Risk Management] project is not impacting commercial fishing areas,” Harras said, placing the fishing “haven” Hull referred to as 9 miles distant from the borrow area. “One reason this borrow area was chosen is because it does not contain any hard bottoms. This is an important characteristic for a borrow area to have so that compatible beach quality material can be used for placement, as required by the Florida “Sand Rule”…. If hard bottoms exist in a project area, buffers are placed around them so the hard bottom area is not impacted and can be avoided by the contractor.”
The public, Harrah wrote, should not confuse the location of the dredge vessel with actual dredging, as the vessel is constantly moving. “The public may notice the dredge vessel appears in a location that is close to the shore during the occasions when the dredge is pumping the sand onto the beach,” Harrah said. “However, the nearshore is not being dredged during this operation. From an onlooker’s perspective looking out at the ocean from the beach, it may appear as though the dredge is located near the shore of the beach, and that dredging is occurring from a nearshore location. That is a misconception. The dredge is only located on the nearshore when it is pumping sand from the borrow area 10 miles offshore onto the beach.”
The statement acknowledges that “fish and other mobile wildlife may be temporarily displaced” by the dredging, but since “fish are mobile species, adverse impacts to the commercial fishing industry are negligible.” (See the full statement below.)
Bayer isn’t convinced. He has personal experience from his years in South Florida where, he said, a similar operation demolished a reef. “Once upon a time I was a marine biologist before going to law school and we had the similar issue happened down in Fort Lauderdale,” he said. “I used to dive all the time and they killed all the reef. They didn’t kill the reef by dredging and digging up the reef,” he said, but by layering it with sand. “That’s what will kill the soft corals. That’s what will kill the sponges and the sea fans. That’s what our concern is about. So the dredge doesn’t have to be right on top of the reef to cause the problem. It can be in close proximity to the reef. We’ve all seen the siltation out here on the beach. It’s the same type of thing that can cause adverse impacts on the reef.”
Bayer is seeking copies of the dredge log that indicates precisely where the sand is being dredged. If it is in close proximity to the habitat, he wants to know what can be done to protect it. “Everyone knows that this is an extremely critical fishing area,” he said.
Cline loves the renourishment project. She called it “amazing.” A few days ago she went to the project site to collect shells. She struck up a conversation with one of the workers, who described how the material would drop on the beach–with live sea life. “He goes yeah, they’re alive,” Cline recalled. “And at that moment my heart broke and I’m like, wait a minute. He said normally, they don’t like to have them be alive. But they’re alive. I can’t see the shells. But then the seagulls descended upon them, and so they were eating a live animal.”
The city commission was receptive, though its authority is limited. “I’m speaking for myself that I’m sure that all the board supports the idea that this needs to be done properly. And if there’s any kind of irregularities, if not illegality is going on, that needs to be corrected,” Spradley, the commission chair, said. He cautioned that the city is not a party to the contract, which involved the county, th Army Corps of Engineer and the contractor, Weeks Marine, of New Jersey. “What we can do, and I’m sure will do, is to be the voice of the residents here to make sure that message gets to the proper hands. I know through Mr. Bayer and others the county is already aware, because we’re already getting replies from the county attorney so we have their attention.”
The United Nations warned last September that “the marine dredging industry is extracting a staggering six billion tons of sand and sediment annually,” the equivalent of 1 million dump trucks every day, with irreversible damage to marine biodiversity and the well-being of coastal communities. “The scale of environmental impacts of shallow sea mining activities and dredging is alarming, including biodiversity, water turbidity, and noise impacts on marine mammals,” Pascal Peduzzi, director of a UN environmental program known as GRIG, was quoted as saying. “This data signals the urgent need for better management of marine sand resources and to reduce the impacts of shallow sea mining.”
Unlike strip-mining or coal-mining’s mountaintop removal in Appalachia, which was visible and drew sharp opposition, undersea dredging is invisible but for its obvious beach-regenerating effects. It is more difficult to determine if and when sensitive grounds are damaged, and that information generally rests with the same organizations doing the dredging, making it difficult to verify independently absent full transparency of documentation.
army-corps-statement
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