Fort Lauderdale gets plenty of tourist love for its sunny beaches, but it ought to be famous for something else: it is home to the most significant stands of staghorn coral and Queen conch left in the continental U.S.<\/p>\n
These valuable species live just offshore, part of the fascinating Florida Barrier Reef Tract, a diving and snorkeling destination which starts north of Palm Beach and runs south 350 miles through Fort Lauderdale and Miami and around Florida\u2019s southern tip to the Gulf\u2019s\u2019 Dry Tortugas islands off Key West.<\/p>\n
All of us who depend on the natural gifts that this reef brings \u2014 and that\u2019s all of us — should pay close attention to a flawed plan by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to pursue the biggest permitted coral destruction in U.S. history, right in Ft. Lauderdale\u2019s backyard.<\/p>\n
The Corps wants to engage in a massive dredging project at Fort Lauderdale\u2019s port \u2014 Port Everglades \u2014 to make way for ever-bigger ships.\u00a0To do this, the Corps will dredge 400 underwater acres, blasting the seafloor with explosives, potentially for more than 200 days a year over five years. The dredging spreads plumes of cloudy sediment over everything, and the blasting is torture for dolphins and other creatures that need underwater communication to find food, get mates, and raise young. The dredging could also harm the sea turtles and manatees that swim along our coast.<\/p>\n
Worse yet, the project would bury over 200 acres of coral habitat in sediment. That would spell serious trouble for queen conch, which breed near the channel the Corps wants to dredge. And it could mean extinction for the already struggling staghorn coral \u2014 a rare, stunning species that branches out like deer antlers and provides a home for fish and other reef critters. A recent study found this area is home to the last, healthiest remaining population of staghorn coral in Florida. These corals need our help to survive, but rather than bringing aid, the Corps\u2019 plan would obliterate them.<\/p>\n
To see what could go wrong, we can look just 30 miles down the coast, to PortMiami, where a similar Corps dredging project caused an ecological disaster. The Corps wiped out a chunk of the Florida Barrier Reef, despite official assurances that it would be protected. To the shock of divers who went to check, millions of corals over a sea floor the size of 210 football fields were smothered in sediment. They still haven\u2019t been restored. The dredging may also be responsible for a deadly disease outbreak that decimated coral throughout the Caribbean and caused one coral species to go extinct in Florida.<\/p>\n
Why would we allow the Corps to repeat this ecological assault when they haven\u2019t even fixed the damage they did a decade ago in Miami?<\/p>\n
Earthjustice is working with Miami Waterkeeper, the Florida Wildlife Federation, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Diving Equipment and Marketing Association, and other concerned folk to pause this project until the Corps establishes essential protections for the marine resources we all depend on, like the staghorn coral and queen conch.<\/p>\n
We are not the only ones sounding the alarm: When the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reviewed the Corps\u2019 official analyses of the dredging impact, NOAA scientists bluntly called it \u201cunintelligible,\u201d lacking \u201cfundamentally important information,\u201d and containing \u201csignificant factual and analytical flaws.\u201d<\/p>\n
Aside from being magical underwater wonderlands, reefs are biological workhorses and nurseries for marine wildlife. And they shield Florida\u2019s coastline from wave action by 95% on average. That coral reef buffer is lifesaving with rising sea levels and stronger storms hitting our shoreline. It\u2019s a harsh fact that Florida\u2019s coral reefs have declined by over 80% since the 1970s, and a stark reminder that we need to protect what\u2019s left.<\/p>\n