Deepening of the Savannah harbor awaits the go-ahead from Congress on new funding levels, but that doesn’t mean the project is at a standstill, representatives from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers told the Georgia Environmental Conference Thursday.
Before dredging begins here, Congress must update a spending cap of $459 million Congress placed on the project in 1999 and then allocate the funds.
In the meantime, there’s plenty of pre-digging work. The corps is preparing contract documents with detailed engineering designs for both dredging and mitigation projects.
“We had to go from feasibility report to contract documents,” said Bill Bailey, chief of the planning division for the corps’ Savannah district.
Mitigation projects total almost half the project’s budget and include a small reservoir to protect Savannah’s surface water, a fish bypass near Augusta, the recovery of the sunken Confederate ironclad the CSS Georgia, and a massive oxygen injection system.
The $652 million deepening project will allow larger ships to call on Savannah without waiting on tides or limiting their loads. Those ships are predicted to become more commonplace with the expansion of the Panama Canal, now projected to be complete in 2016. Savannah’s harbor deepening project is well into pre-construction monitoring, some of which began in September 2012. That data collection — which ranges from in-stream water quality measures to the tracking of endangered fish — is crucial to the project’s pledge to adapt its mitigation as it proceeds to minimize environmental damage, said Margarett “Mackie” McIntosh, physical scientist with the corps.
The corps is developing a web portal for the monitoring data, which in a requirement unique to this project, will be collected for 10 years after construction.
“The web portal is one of the more important features because not only will it be a clearinghouse for the public to see what’s going on but for the corps it will be a way for all the data to come to one central location,” McIntosh said.
McIntosh did not yet have a target date for the web portal’s availability.
The 8th Annual Georgia Environmental Conference is being held this year at the Jekyll Island Convention Center after holding its first seven conferences in Savannah. The three-day conference, which attracts about 500 government and industry participants, continues through today.