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After speaking to Project Engineer for the Army Corp of Engineers, Paul Cotter, my angle for my project has slightly changed. He informed me that the current dredging in progress in Brevard County is off shore dredging. The sand and sediments are being dredged and then transferred from 5 miles off shore by a tube that runs along the sea floor. The amount of sediment being placed on shore is 312 truck loads an hour. This process is called beach re-nourishment. I would like to compare the beach sediments. I will collect the sediments from before the re-nourishment and then after the deep water sediment has been replaced onshore. Some questions I am posing are how do theses sediments differ? How could this impact the shore as well as the ocean floor? Once I travel to the site just south of the Port of Canaveral, I will assess the magnitude of this operation. Mr. Cotter and I spoke for a long time about the costs and restrictions that may make the operation difficult to proceed at times; such as machine maintenance, environmental protest, and limited time as turtle season approaches. But the cost of this production is $24 million per day. The crew works 24/7 and will complete a little over 20 miles of Brevards Beach re-nourishment. How many truck loads would that be? Mr. Cotter's argument is that we are avoiding the harmful effects of thousands of truck loads, which was the old way of bringing the sand in for the beach. I am excited to get to the site this week and assess this for myself.
On a side note, below is a link to the info about the St. Johns River Clean up....
http://www.flvec.com/volusia-flagler/content/UrlView.aspx?id=68
St. Johns River Cleanup
April 12, 20148 to 11:00 a.m.
Hey Valerie, something is wrong with the link I believe, it took me to the page for "Local Business Tax". Is this a clean up where people pick up garbage from the riverbanks?
ReplyDeleteyes...I will locate the link again...lol
DeleteIt is still going to the tax page....but if you go to the home page from this link then the ad pops up for the clean up....not sure why this is not working directly.
Deletehttp://www.flvec.com/volusia-flagler/content/UrlView.aspx?id=68
ReplyDeleteHere is the correct link...
Oh no, I see what you mean, even if you click on "Home" then on the ad once it pops up, every single page is the exact same URL address. How weird! I saw that one of the clean up locations is in Deleon Springs, I haven't expanded my plastic debris research to rivers, yet, so I VERY much appreciate this information. Thank you!
DeleteAs for your project, something I'd be interested in and probably would ask after a presentation, is how marine life is affected by this tube transporting the sediment. Do, occasionally, fish get sucked into it? Once done, do they leave the tube out there or disassemble and remove it?
ReplyDeleteHave you picked out how you are going to relocate your sample sites after the re-nourishment?
ReplyDelete