Corps Seeks Input On Restoring Navigation To Georgia Waterway

The Mobile Engineer District held a public hearing March 31 in Tallahassee, Fla., — at the behest of Congress — seeking public input on restarting dredging on the Apalachicola River system to allow commercial navigation once again. The hearing is likely to restart a bitter public debate on the river system, whose ecosystem, environmentalists believe, was degraded and nearly destroyed by the 44-year-long attempt to maintain a navigation channel.

The Chattahoochee and Flint rivers both originate in northern Georgia in the Appalachian foothills, flowing parallel due south and joining to form the Apalachicola River that connects with the Intracoastal Waterway in the Florida Panhandle. It’s about 500 miles from the headwaters of the Chattahoochee to Apalachicola Bay, which is protected from the Gulf by a barrier island. The lower 30 miles of the Apalachicola is surrounded by swamps and wetlands. Dams on the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers regulate the amount of freshwater allowed into Apalachicola Bay. Disputes over management of the bay’s salinity — primarily determined by the flow of fresh water from the river — have led to tension and lawsuits between Florida, Alabama and Georgia.

Commercial marine traffic along the Apalachicola was important in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Riverboats carried cotton downriver to the Gulf before the Civil War. The river’s mouth was considered important enough to defend with several artillery batteries. After the war, lumber became an important export, as turpentine and rosin for “naval stores” were distilled from pine sap. The production of tupelo honey, produced by bees from the flowers of the tupelo tree, is clustered around the Apalachicola Basin, where tupelo trees grow in abundance.

The bend just below where the Flint joined the Chattahoochee to form the Apalachicola was known as a dangerous point, and the wrecks of steamboats are still visible in the area. Despite supporters pushing the river as a continued freightway in the early 20th century, commercial traffic declined and some paddlewheel vessels were tied up along the banks and abandoned, including the Barbara Hunt, which began in 1929 as a paddlewheeeler on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. It sank in 1940 and is a federally protected wreck site.Beginning in the late 19th century, oysters became an important industry in the lower river. Environmentalists and oyster harvesters blame the dredging of the river for almost wiping it out. In 1946, Congress passed the River and Harbor Act, which authorized the Corps to maintain a 100-foot by 9-foot channel in the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint system from Apalachicola to Columbus, Georgia — an authorization maintained to this day.

The Apalachicola Riverkeeper group claims in a video that the Apalachicola is “inherently resistant to dredging” because of the gradient of the coastal plain through which it runs. The organization calls the Corps’ 44-year effort to maintain a navigation channel an environmental disaster that ended with giant piles of dredged sand along the banks, floods of sediment going downriver, the near-extinction of river species due to the sand and the blocking of spreading waters into surrounding wetlands.

A 1992 Congressional Budget Office report called the Apalachicola channel project the most expensive Corps project in the South, with the lowest cost-benefit return. It estimated an average cost per ton-mile 24 times that of the Upper Mississippi River. A 2002 report called the project a “boondoggle for barges.”

Apalachicola Bay was closed to oyster dredging in 2020. Since 2019, more than $38 million has been invested in projects to re-start a sustainable oyster industry. Last November, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis applauded the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s unanimous approval of a plan to reestablish an oyster industry in Apalachicola Bay. The plan will establish annual seasons based on oyster abundance on various oyster reefs in the bay.

The last Corps dredging of the Apalachicola River segment occurred in 2001. Barge traffic effectively halted in 2003, since navigation locks were unused, although they remained open for recreational traffic until 2021, when they were closed permanently.