Green groups plan lawsuit over expansion of Port Everglades’ entrance channel
Green groups on Tuesday said they are planning to sue the US Army Corps of Engineers in a bid to force a rethink about plans to expand Port Everglades in south Florida.
The environmentalists are concerned that the work of widening, deepening and lengthening the entrance channel to the port will entail much more extensive damage to coral reefs than the Corps anticipates.
Parties planning to sue – Miami Waterkeeper, the Centre for Biological Diversity, Florida Wildlife Federation, Earthjustice and a Fort Lauderdale dive shop called Sea Experience – fear that the official projection of 21 acres of coral reef being damaged by the work is a woeful underestimate.
They base their concerns on what happened in a similar project at Port Miami where a far bigger area of coral – equivalent to the size of 200 football fields -was killed than the Corps’ environmental review had forecast.
The Corps claims that the protesters have exaggerated the damage in Port Miami and that a lot of the excess coral destruction was caused not by the dredging but by an outbreak of white plague disease.
In the Port Everglades case the plan is to deepen the channel by 6 to 13 feet and to widen it by 300 feet. The expansion is to better equip the Port to accept the larger ships that will be using the Panama Canal when its expansion is finalized this month.
While primarily a very busy cruise port, Port Everglades is also the busiest container port in Florida and a major port for receiving petroleum products and alternative fuels.
