Activist: Dredge may kill turtles

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Florida
MIAMI HERALD
Activist: Dredge may kill turtles
By Cara Buckley, cbuckley@herald.com
February 24, 2004

Plans to dredge Key West harbor without trawling the seabed beforehand
anger an advocate for sea turtles.

KEY WEST - The upcoming dredging of Key West harbor will suck one
million cubic yards of built-up sand, stones and silt from the sea
floor, restore the city's shipping channel to its original depth and do
away with vast amounts of sediment muddying the sea.

But in the eyes of one marine life activist, it will also kill sea
turtles, and with the dredge's start-date days away, he is trying
frantically to persuade the project's masterminds to amend their plans.

At issue for Richie Moretti, head of the Turtle Hospital in Marathon, is
the Army Corps of Engineers' decision to use a hopper dredge for part of
the cleanup without trawling the area for turtles beforehand.

Hopper dredges, which have suction arms that vacuum up silt and send it
through giant rotating blades, are known to kill turtles.

''It is a vacuum cleaner with teeth that eats turtles,'' said Moretti,
who recently hired a Tallahassee-based lawyer to advance his case.

But representatives from the Navy, the Army Corps of Engineers and the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said painstaking
reasoning went into the decisions to use a hopper dredge and not to
trawl.

The dredging project, slated to begin within a week, got the green light
and necessary permits from local, state and federal agencies, including
the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.

''Mr. Moretti is very well intentioned,'' said Paul Krueger, an
environmental protection specialist with the Army Corps of Engineers.
``But we try to look at everything, and we did.''

PROJECT LOGISTICS

The hopper device will be used for 20 days during the two-year, $36
million maintenance dredge, which the Navy initiated to deepen the
channel in preparation for an influx of ships after the shutdown of its
Vieques base in Puerto Rico. Dredged material will be moved to Fleming
Key. Krueger said everything the hopper dredge sucks up will go into its
onboard hopper, which resembles a giant bathtub, keeping the sea more
pristine.

Fewer water-borne particles will allow the region's embattled coral
reefs to better photosynthesize, he said. Also, a turtle-deflecting drag
head, similar to a cowcatcher, will be attached to the front of the
dredger, purportedly reducing turtle deaths by 90 percent. Onboard
observers will inspect dredged material and report if a turtle gets
sucked up, though ones that do won't likely survive.

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