Tons of goo to be gone after dredging to deepen Manatee Pocket

TCPalm
By MICHAEL TRIMBOLI Correspondent
Wednesday, December 9, 2009

PORT SALERNO - Lined with marinas and restaurants, boatyards and fueling stations, the Manatee Pocket has long been a busy commercial hub for boating.

Yet some out-of-town boaters are steering clear of the estuary for fear they might get stuck in the muck — almost 15 feet of oozy sediment that has settled onto the pocket’s bottom from upstream development and its stormwater runoff.

But the goo will be gone if local residents and Martin County officials have their way.

They are preparing to scrape out 270,000 cubic yards of the slurry — thousands of tons of the stuff — to deepen the boating channel, restore the area’s economy, and improve the environment for sea grasses, crabs, clams, invertebrates and many species of fish.

The Manatee Pocket Project will cost $12 million and will be financed with federal, state and county money. It is expected to start in January and could take 15 months to complete, said Martin County Coastal Engineer Kathy Fitzpatrick.

The project contractor, Dickerson of Florida, plans to use a hydraulic dredge and miles of pipe to remove the mixture of fine-grained sand and organic material that flowed into the pocket. The muck will be pumped out and transported to a site to dry.

The muck could be either disposed of at a landfill or, because of it’s shown to be non-toxic, put to “public use,” government documents show. Fitzpatrick noted that if not harmful, “it would probably be mixed with other material and used as fill for public projects such as roads, bridges, landscape, etc.”

The hydraulic dredge, according to Fitzpatrick, was ordered to have noise reduction placed on the engine so as to not disturb the residents and businesses within the pocket.

The pocket is directly connected to the Intracoastal Waterway and the Okeechobee Waterway, which makes it a big draw for commercial fisherman and a variety of pleasure boats.

It has become so shallow though that Steve Chaszar, a pocket local and the 34-year-old general manager of A&J Boat Yard, finds himself having to help boaters unfamiliar with the area around grounding dangers.

Yachts built by one pocket boatyard, The Hinckley Company, once were able to get out, but can no longer return to the estuary because there’s not enough depth to accommodate them.

“A lot of people are skeptical at entering the pocket at high tide,” Chaszar said, adding that they would find “four to five feet of water … if (they’re) lucky.”

Thousands of dollars of damage could be caused to propellers, motors and boats that hit bottom, Chaszar said. Many residents said that there may be an assortment of junk on the bottom.

A&J’s former owner Art Cox, 70, is one of the original members of the Pocket Bunch, a group of local marina and boat yards that took it upon themselves to raise awareness of the muck problem. The group has been one of the driving forces behind the project.

Work began early November to prepare a staging area at Sandsprit Park that will take up seven boat trailer parking spaces at the west end of the park. Two park boat ramps will be used to launch pipe equipment and vessels.

Commercial fisherman Bill O’Neil, a 38-year Stuart resident, has been traveling the pocket for as long as he can remember, and he, like many of his fellow commercial fisherman, use the pocket as a base of operations.

O’Neil sees the long-term benefit of the project, but feels that the more immediate effects of the dredging will cause some problems for locals.

“The dredging will cause pollution,” O’Neil said. “It’s a give and take. Bigger boats later on mean more money.”

Officials say they are doing all they can to minimize navigability problems in the channel during dredging.

According to the project’s Web site, www.manateepocketproject.com, “The enclosure will be as small as practical so as to limit its interference with navigation. The dredge and the enclosure will also move frequently so that the amount of time any one place is blocked will be very limited.”

Prior to the start of the project, Martin County established multiple stormwater runoff treatments to prevent the muck from building up in the pocket after clean-up, Fitzpatrick said.

“We are guardedly optimistic,” Fitzpatrick said.

Michael Trimboli is a Florida Atlantic University student working as a correspondent for Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers as a part of a senior-level journalism course.