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Making a deep port deeper
Dredging project will widen channel, rebuild habitat, extend La Quinta channel
By Matthew Sturdevant/Caller-Times
Officials at the Port of Corpus Christi hope Congress will authorize tens of millions of dollars in federal funds this year to deepen and widen the ship channel from Port Aransas to the port.
In June, the chief of the Army Corps of Engineers signed off on the ship channel project. Last fall, the House of Representatives approved the Water Resources Development Act, which includes the channel project, said Port of Corpus Christi Executive Director John LaRue.
The Senate will review the water resources act and LaRue said he hopes they will approve it — thereby funding the ship channel project — before the Senate's summer recess in July.
The $140 million project would deepen the ship channel from 45 to 52 feet. It will widen the channel from 400 to 530 feet across Corpus Christi and Redfish bays. And, it will extend La Quinta Channel 7,400 feet at its existing depth of 39 feet and width of 400 feet.
The Army Corps of Engineers will begin preliminary engineering and planning for the dredging project in the next year or two, said Marilyn Uhrich, a spokeswoman for the corps' Galveston District. The project will involve moving some 41 million cubic yards of dredged material — enough to cover a three-mile high football field.
The deepest port
Construction could begin in 2005 or 2006, port officials said, and the project will take seven to 10 years to complete.
The project consists of several different contracts, LaRue said. Federal funds would pay for 50 percent of some contracts and 75 percent of others, he said. The port or its users will pay for the rest of the cost, and it won't be clear how much that contribution will be until the Senate appropriates funds.
The local ship channel is deeper than most in the Gulf of Mexico, and this project would make it the deepest, said David Krams, senior project engineer for the Port of Corpus Christi.
"We're leaping ahead of the competition that has not yet caught up with us," said port Chairman Ruben Bonilla. "We'll make the Port of Corpus Christi even more competitive than it already is."
By making the channel wider and deeper companies will reduce their transportation costs, Krams said.
"It will reduce the number of ships it takes to move the same amount of cargo," Krams said.
The wider channel also will be safer, allowing more room for ships to pass each other more easily as they come and go, he said.
"It's pretty narrow," Bonilla said. "It's not recommended for ships to pass."
While the channel is being dredged, some of the 41 million cubic yards of dredged sediment will be used in an environmentally friendly way. For example, the sediment will be used to create 935 acres of shallow-water wildlife habitat, 26 acres of marsh, 26,400 linear feet of rock breakwater, and shoreline protection of a bird island and more than 400 acres of wetlands.
"Those are the kinds of habitat that we've lost here," said Ray Allen, executive director of Coastal Bend Bays & Estuaries Program.
‘we are extremely pleased'
Allen said Krams and the port's environmental planner, Paul Carangelo, got the bays and estuaries program involved in the environmental aspects of the project, determining what adverse effects the dredging might have and how to mitigate them. All of those environmental changes and the mitigation strategies were addressed in a Corps of Engineers document called the Environmental Impact Statement, or the EIS.
Allen said the mitigation would more than counter the loss of habitat for certain parts of the dredging, like the La Quinta channel.
"We were extremely pleased with the EIS, and we thought it was a great way to handle the project," Allen said.
Contact Matthew Sturdevant at 886-3778 or sturdevantm@caller.com
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