SAVANNAH, Ga. – The federal government is close to undoing a policy that for 30 years has protected rare sea turtles from being mangled and killed by machines used to suck sediments from shipping channels in four Southern states.
The Army Corps of Engineers is in charge of keeping U.S. waterways clear for boats and ships. Since 1991, the agency has suspended dredging of harbors in Georgia, the Carolinas and Florida during warmer months when sea turtles are most abundant in coastal waters and females lay eggs on Southern beaches.
But, in the coming weeks, the Army Corps plans to begin scrapping those seasonal limits, starting with Georgia, after the National Marine Fisheries Service concluded last year that sea turtles protected by the Endangered Species Act can likely endure roughly 150 deaths anticipated annually from year-round dredging.
Conservationists are sounding alarms, saying the federal government is downplaying the threat to sea turtles’ long-term recovery while reversing a policy that has minimized the number of turtles crushed or dismembered after being sucked into dredges.
The Georgia environmental group One Hundred Miles is urging state officials to resist the change. Sustained efforts to reduce sea turtle deaths in the water and to catalogue and protect their nests on land have been credited with pushing nesting to record levels in the region in 2019. Scientists say the rebound is fragile but encouraging.
“We can’t afford to throw that all away now,” said Catherine Ridley, a One Hundred Miles vice president who also coordinates volunteers for nest counts on St. Simons Island, Ga. “We put our blood, sweat and tears into this effort for decades. And it’s personal to us.”
Thousands of sea turtles that nest each spring and summer share their coastal habitat with busy seaports in all four states. The Army Corps relies on dredging to remove accumulated sediment and debris that can make shipping channels shallower and less safe to navigate.
Army Corps officials say they can eliminate seasonal dredging limits without putting sea turtles in greater peril. They cite both economic and environmental reasons for the change.
Limits since the 1990s varied by state, but roughly confined dredging to between December and March. Those decisions focused too much on sea turtles, while ignoring other protected species such as critically endangered North Atlantic right whales, said Nicole Bonine, environmental compliance and sustainability manager for the Army Corps’ South Atlantic Division.
“We’re saying we need the whole year to evaluate the best way to do it to reduce the risks to all species,” Bonine said. “So it’s not let’s just kill more turtles. That’s nobody’s goal. Our goal is to work with researchers to find ways to continue to reduce that risk.”
The Army Corps also expects year-round dredging will help alleviate project delays caused by states competing to hire a limited number of contractors within the same narrow time frame.
