Info Sheet for Port Everglades NEPA Rescoping Public Meeting February 22, 2017

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1 Info Sheet for Port Everglades NEPA Rescoping Public Meeting February 22, 2017 About the Florida Reef Tract South Florida is home to the only nearshore, barrier reef system in the continental United States. The Florida coral reef tract is a national treasure, as unique as the giant sequoias in California or the Old Faithful geyser in Wyoming. Reefs generate billions of dollars in sales and tens of thousands of jobs to South Florida. Reefs provide shelter, food, and breeding sites for commercially and recreationally valuable fish as well as coastal barriers from storms. South Florida s vibrant fishing community is largely dependent on healthy reefs to provide shelter, food, breeding grounds, nurseries, and other functions for commercial and recreation fish species. Unfortunately, the reefs in Florida have declined by over 80% since the 1970s. Reefs face natural and manmade threats, including climate change, warming oceans, water pollution, ocean acidification, coastal construction, and disease. In the last 2 years in Florida, we have seen back-to-back years of coral bleaching and a devastating coral disease combined with the dredging of the Port of Miami and upcoming dredging at Port Everglades. Our reefs are now in urgent crises. The National Marine Fisheries Service has listed seven species of Florida s corals as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Plans for Port Everglades The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is planning to dredge Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale in order to make way for newer, super-sized shipping vessels. The dredging threatens to harm and kill at least six of the seven ESA-listed coral species as well as vast areas of valuable reef habitat. PortMiami The Corps completed a nearly identical dredging project at the Port of Miami last year, which harmed hundreds, possibly thousands of ESA-listed corals. The dredging in Miami produced fine-grained sediment that unexpectedly extended over 3,000 feet from the channel, smothering corals, depriving them of access to food and light, and preventing reproduction. Coral scientists from the National Marine Fisheries Service found that approximately 95% of the area they surveyed was no longer suitable habitat to support coral as a result of the dredging.

2 The dredging at PortMiami destroyed over 200 acres of critical habitat for threatened coral. What now? After legal action from Miami Waterkeeper, Center for Biological Diversity, DEMA, Florida Wildlife Federation, and Earthjustice, the Corps agreed to rescope the NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) process, which allows for public comment. This process should result in a new environmental analysis. With your input and dedication, we hope that this new analysis includes a more accurate prediction of the true level of risk to the reefs, both in terms of geographic scope and severity from sedimentation impacts. It is imperative that this new analysis accounts for monitoring and mitigation necessary to protect our precious coral reefs. Due to the significance and complexity of the issues, the environmental analysis should be in the form of a supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). By law, the new NEPA analysis must include the best available science, which means that the PortMiami project s findings and outcomes must be considered. By law, you have a right to make comments both in person and in writing, and the Army Corps must consider and respond to these comments. If the Army Corps fails to use accurate scientific information, does not evaluate an adequate number of alternatives, fails to conduct a thorough evaluation of direct and cumulative environmental impacts of the project, or does not appropriately incorporate comments, among other things, citizens may challenge the NEPA analysis in court. History is about to repeat itself in Port Everglades. The Corps last EIS used the same data, assumptions, and strategies for the planned dredging in Port Everglades that it used in Miami, without incorporating any lessons or new information. What do we want in the new analysis? CORAL REEFS There are two kinds of impacts from dredging to coral reefs direct, in which the reef is physically removed to make way for the channel expansion, and indirect, which includes impacts such as sedimentation that are harder to quantify and to predict than direct impacts. Estimates of indirect impacts need to be protective enough to cover worst case scenario coral reef damage due to sedimentation. The original Environmental Impact Statement for Port Everglades was finalized in 2015 without accounting for the coral damage that occurred at PortMiami, even though some data from PortMiami and its impacts were already available at that time. The new EIS must incorporate lessons learned from Miami.

3 The new EIS must consider the full scope of environmental impacts observed at PortMiami, including the much more severe impact from Project-related sedimentation that occurred in Miami and a more widespread geographic area. Instead of accounting for only an estimated 150m indirect impact zone, the indirect impact zone must be extended to at least 1000m from the channel, with proper monitoring and mitigation for impacts throughout that range. Control locations must be chosen far enough away from the project so as not to suffer Project-related impacts, which skew data comparison with near-channel sites. Baseline data must be taken throughout the whole predicted worst-case-scenario indirect impact area. Baseline data taken immediately prior to dredging must be entirely completed prior to any dredging taking place. At PortMiami, dredging was underway when baseline was conducted, leading to the impression that the reefs had naturally high sedimentation and turbidity. The Corps must conduct new coral surveys to estimate the number of coral colonies in the direct and indirect impact zones. The last surveys were completed in 2010 and need to be updated. In addition, coral species newly listed on the ESA must be surveyed and mitigation for possible impacts incorporated. While the mitigation plan for Port Everglades, which involved a blended approach with boulder reef and coral outplanting, is a positive plan, it currently anticipates impacts only out to 150m from the channel. The scope of the mitigation plan needs to be extended and the costs factored into the estimated project costs and Cost-Benefit Analysis. Reefs provide vital habitat for fish and other species. Corals are classified as both Essential Fish Habitat and Protected Species by NMFS. We need better plans to address the potential loss in Essential Fish Habitat through mitigation plans that address the whole reefscape. The new EIS must consider potential coral disease risk as a result of dredging, and must examine data that potentially indicates that the dredging in Miami contributed to the widespread disease outbreak that appears to have started near the PortMiami dredging site and spread throughout reefs up to Broward County, as well as recent scientific literature linking dredging and disease. As NMFS suggested, the Corps should consider ceasing dredging in the months prior to and just after coral spawning as turbidity and sedimentation can impede corals reproductive capacity. Storms and hurricanes are NOT proxies for estimating potential sediment impacts from dredging and the Corps should not use them as proxies to estimate potential damage from sedimentation. This leads to a chronic underestimation of potential sedimentation impacts. Hurricanes suspend already-present sediment and redeposit on the reef. Dredging adds more sediment that was not in the system and adds it to the reef environment. Hurricanes

4 also last for 1 day, while dredging can last for several years. Both factors make the sedimentation impacts of dredging much more severe. The associated Project cost estimate and cost-benefit analysis must be updated to account for the increased monitoring and mitigation necessary for reef protection. Turbidity (or sediment suspended in the water column) limits (at 29 NTUs) are too high to protect nearby reefs, as shown at PortMiami. Real-time turbidity monitoring protocols and oversight by a properly qualified, independent, third party that is also available to the public should be implemented. Scows used for the transport of dredged material offshore must be loaded in a manner that minimizes or eliminates the need to dewater (the leading cause of sedimentation in Miami) and cannot be allowed to leak sediment in route to the offshore disposal site. Coral relocations must be to areas outside of even a worst-case scenario indirect impact zone to avoid sedimentation impacts on relocated corals. Sediment blocks were intended for compliance monitoring at PortMiami, but they failed to capture any sediment and methods were not revised. Functioning sediment compliance monitoring tools must be used, and the biological monitoring plan must also include measurements of sediment depth. Mineralogical and tracer analyses of sediment should be conducted before, during, and after dredging at channel-side and control sites. The Corps contract should give the agency the ability to implement mandatory shutdown thresholds if certain stress criteria are met. The dredging contractor and the Army Corps should be responsible for any additional environmental mitigation from unanticipated impacts, not the County taxpayers. The Corps must update their estimated costs and perform a new cost-benefit analysis with new damage estimates and monitoring and mitigation requirements included. The Corps should also mitigate for corals that currently line the channel walls and have colonized there since the last expansion dredging, as some extensive reef areas are present. The Corps policy is currently not to mitigate for the corals on the channel walls. The Corps must stabilize the fractures in the hardbottom to avoid destabilization and collapse downslope from movement of rubble and sediment, which can disrupt the attachment of reef organisms. Simply relying on adaptive management mid-project to protect reefs is wholly insufficient. Adaptive management is almost impossible to quantify or to enforce. The Corps needs to set enforceable and mandatory limits on coral stress, sedimentation,

5 SEAGRASS turbidity, seagrass impacts, and other metrics, which will trigger an automatic shutdown of the dredging until the issues are addressed and corrected. The Corps was unwilling to direct the contractor to use best management practices to address ongoing coral stress at PortMiami. Seagrass mitigation must account for all areas that have contained seagrass during any survey, including historically mapped areas. New seagrass surveys should also be undertaken to be more up to date. Seagrass is a dynamic habitat, and therefore multiple surveys are necessary to understand the full boundaries of the seagrass bed. Currently, the Corps underestimates the actual amount of seagrass mitigation that will be required. The Corps finds, for example, 7.41 acres of seagrass within the project footprint, but will only mitigate for 4.21 acres that were occupied by seagrass at the time of the last survey. NMFS recommends mitigation for no less than 8.45 acres of seagrass habitat. The Corps treatment of currently unoccupied seagrass beds as sand ignores best available science. The Corps proposes to use 2.9 seagrass credits at nearby West Lake Park. However, only 2.2 seagrass are currently available at West Lake Park. Therefore, there are not enough seagrass credits available at West Lake Park to account for the Corps current mitigation plan. An alternative plan must be proposed. If the Corps used NOAA s seagrass mitigation estimation, they would need over 5 seagrass credits, which are also not available at West Lake Park. Furthermore, the seagrass at West Lake Park does not provide an ecological equivalent to the seagrass that will be lost from Port Everglades, which is a nursery habitat for federally managed species such as gray snapper, gag grouper, and blue striped grunt. West Lake Park is too far from the inlet and from coral reefs to provide the same ecological services, and likely has different planktonic larvae flow, temperature variability, salinity ranges, and other ecological differences to the Port Everglades seagrass area. Many studies have linked species diversity to proximity to an ocean inlet. A lack of availability of other suitable mitigation areas is not a reason to overinflate the appropriateness of limited credits available at West Lake Park. A new seagrass mitigation plan must be developed, which include these considerations. The cost of a new seagrass mitigation must be incorporated in the project cost estimates and Cost-Benefit Analysis. TURNING NOTCH Dredging and expanding the turning notch will impact seagrass and over 8 acres of mature mangroves. This portion of the project has now been turned over the County, but still has significant cumulative impacts on Essential Fish Habitat and other ecological considerations. Despite this project now falling to the local sponsor, it is part of the same port expansion effort, it was simply segmented from the federal analysis. The Corps now counts this as environmental improvement that they ve been able to achieve through the NEPA process. However, NEPA forbids segmenting the project to avoid addressing

6 cumulative ecological damage. The Corps must consider the turning notch impacts in as part of the Project s overall ecological impacts. CZMA CONSISTENCY Coastal Zone Management Act consistency determination has only been conditionally granted by the State of Florida. The Corps must include an updated flooding and flushing model that estimates potential increased flooding risk on nearby properties due to the deepening and widening of the channel and incorporate an analysis of sea level rise risk post-dredging. The Corps also must obtain a Water Quality Certification and comply with existing state water quality standards rather than obtaining variances from those standards as they did at PortMiami. The Corps must also detail any impacts to John U. Lloyd State Park.