"A permanent time release of mud, "is how a visiting geologist described the goo dumped onto St. Lucie County beaches in April. The claylike stuff came from a site miles inland.

As this summer approached, bulldozers bellowed smoke, dredges chipped away at the continental shelf, and millions of cubic yards of sediments were deposited on Florida beaches. The Florida Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) had permitted 34 dredge-and-fill projects for beaches around the state. Among these, a rapid shoring up of beaches in St. Lucie County, affected by last fall’s Atlantic hurricanes.

In April, Coastal Planning & Engineering had sediments trucked in from an inland mine at the corner of Indrio Road and I-95 for a shoreline restoration project in St. Lucie County. Typically, the mine produces roadbed material, mostly clay, fine sediments and crushed rock. The sediments were steamrolled into a hard-packed berm onto the beach face. St. Lucie beaches have ranked second in turtle nest numbers in the state and boasted vast, healthy nearshore reefs. The beaches are famous for pompano fishing.

Dr. Hal Wanless, Chair of Geological Sciences at the University of Miami, drove up to inspect the damage.

Wanless said, “The sediment they put down here is unsuitable. There are clods of clay and such a high proportion of fine material. It has nothing to do with the beach sand on any of Florida’s beaches. This is going to be a permanent time release of mud into the system.”

For weeks, water color and consistency resembled diarrhea along Hutchinson Island.

“But it met DEP standards,” insisted Richard Bouchard, St. Lucie County’s coastal engineer. Bouchard is a director on the board of the Florida Shore & Beach Preservation Association, the organization that lobbies state and local legislators for coastal dredging and related “shore-protection” projects. Martin County engineer (and Chair of FSBPA) Don Donaldson hadn’t visited the St. Lucie site, even though only an arbitrary county line divides Hutchinson Island and Martin County’s tremendous fish habitats, directly downstream.

DEP is analyzing the sediments, and Dr. Wanless doubts they meet DEP standards, which Debbie Flack (FSBPA’s lobbyist) helped write, and which Wanless says aren’t strict enough. He also analyzed the sediments recently placed over four miles of Martin County beaches, in the proximity of some of the state’s most biologically diverse nearshore reefs.

“Contrary to what the people who are promoting this practice are saying,” said Wanless, “both the St. Lucie and Martin County projects will erode rapidly, and turbidity is going to be a serious problem for a long while. The finer sediments will smother reefs.”

At the southern end of Florida’s Atlantic coast, yet another debacle ensued.

In April, Army Corps of Engineers Project Manager Penny Cutt, and John Studt, Chief of the Corps’ regulatory branch, kick-started an 11-mile project in Broward County. Permits required contractors to transplant 2,000 doomed corals, required extensive pre-construction monitoring of these transplanted organisms’ health, and required the distribution of education modules for dredge operators on techniques for reef protection. As of May 1, only a few hundred corals had been transplanted—none successfully. The monitoring hadn’t been completed, and the Corps passed out education modules only after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) sent stern letters.

At left is natural sand from a beach north of Fort Pierce Inlet; at right is offshore borrow material that was pumped onto Martin County beaches. Given a shake, the natural sand settled out in seconds, while the borrow material fouled the water indefinitely.

“The contractor destroyed existing nearshore hardbottom with giant bould-ers they brought in to imitate low-relief reefs,” said Dan Clarke, director of Cry of the Water, an independent monitoring group.

“They’re just big, algae-covered, slimy boulders,” said Dr. Ray McAllister, Professor Emeritus of Ocean Engineering at Florida Atlantic University, and author of the popular dive guide, McAllister’s Guide to Reefs. “A few of the transplanted corals are alive, but they have white plague. In short, the mitigation is a dismal failure.”

“We’re hoping to resolve this locally,” said Miles Croom, from NMFS Habitat Conservation Division. NMFS recently proposed elkhorn and staghorn corals for listing as threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. Acres of staghorn are threatened by the Broward project.

In certain areas, appropriate beach-fill projects may be necessary to maintain turtle and shorebird nesting habitats. But Wanless and other leading geologists say that if maintaining biological diversity in coastal Florida is a goal, more rigorous testing for sediment compatibility and durability is a must.

“For lots of reasons what’s good for turtles is good for Floridians,” said David Godfrey, executive director of the Caribbean Conservation Corporation, our nation’s oldest sea turtle conservation group. “Like people, turtles need clean healthy beaches, sandy dry areas, clean water and healthy reefs.”

Howard Marlowe, a Congressional lobbyist, often touts massive beach-fill projects as turtle-habitat restorations.