© 2024 Maine Public | Registered 501(c)(3) EIN: 22-3171529
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
Scroll down to see all available streams.

Group Advances Alternative to Searsport Dredging Plan

A Washington, D.C., consulting group says a less costly, less damaging dredging plan would still allow Searsport's Mack Point to accommodate larger tankers and cargo ships.

  The Isleboro Islands Trust opposes the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' dredging plan for the channel off Searsport and hired the firm Dawson and Associates to research alternatives.

In its report, released today in Augusta, Dawson also calls for further environmental and economic study before any dredging is allowed to move forward.

Congress first asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to begin looking at additional dredging in the channel off Searsport 14 years ago. Mack Point's operators, Sprague Energy and Irving Oil, have long believed that the port can handle much more petroleum and dry cargo than it currently does. To do that, the Army Corps says the channel off Searsport would need to be deepened from 35 to 40 feet to handle larger vessels like Handymax and Supermax container ships. But the Corps' current dredging plan has environmental groups and regional land trusts worried, so they sought out help.

"We went to a premiere firm in Washington, D.C., whose staff has dealt with dredging projects, nationally, for many many years," Steve Miller of Isleboro Islands Trust says. He says the firm, Dawson and Associates, researched the Army Corps dredging proposal extensively and the group came up with an alternative that would still allow the port to begin berthing larger ships.

"The stated goals of the port users could potentially be met by maintaining the channel at its currently authorized depth, increasing the depth of the berths and taking advantage of the tides," Miller says.

Miller and the trust are calling on the Army Corps to study this alternative and to consider adopting it. The U.S. Army Corps did not return a call or email for comment by airtime. Midcoast lawmakers, meantime, joined Isleboro officials at a midmorning news conference to echo concerns about the current dredging proposal.

"I am not opposed to a maintenance dredge. I am not opposed to the development of the port, per se," says state Rep. Chuck Kruger, a Thomaston Democrat.

He says he is worried about the lobster fishery in Penobscot Bay, "which is a very important component of the midcoast economy. I'm very concerned about the impact of a massive dredge on the lobster population."

To deepen the channel from 35 to 40 feet, the Army Corps would need to scoop up nealy 900,000 cubic yards of silt from the ocean floor. The dredged material would be dumped six miles away, at a disposal site in Penobscot Bay or at an alternative location in the lower bay off Rockland. Speaking in February at a public forum, Steve Wolf, an environmental engineer with the Army Corps, said only a thin veneer of material near the surface of the sea floor is acutally contaminated.

"That's what we tested," he says "It's very suitable — what I call the 'suitable' material. So, by meeting the state's requirements and the EPA's requirements, that material was acceptable to go out into the water."

But at that hearing, Wolf also acknowledged the lobster industry's concern about the project and noted that he and his team had not studied what the short-term effect of the project might be on Maine's most lucrative fishery. All the more reason, say state lawmakerrs, for the Army Corps to do an extensive environmental impact study on the project.

"Given that we've already suffered a mercury pollution incident in Penobscot Bay that's affecting our fisheries, it would seem that it's just a modest request and one we should insist on," says state Rep. Jeffrey Evangelos, a Friendship independent.

Last month, the state finalized a two-year ban on lobster and crab fishing near Mack Point due to elevated mercury levels in sediment where the Penobscot River flows into Penobscot Bay. An environmental impact study, dredging opponents say, would at least give the U.S. Army Corps a better idea of whether disturbing all that sediment would spread the mercury contamination into a wider swath of Penobscot Bay.