The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers turned down researchers' requests to give them more time in saving an underwater coral field before dredging in the Miami channel begins on June 14.
Dredging on the channel was proposed to make it 50 feet deeper. The State expected that more cargo ships would pass through the widened Panama Canal after the project.
As soon as the news of the dredging was confirmed, researchers started diving for corals. The dredging contractor, Great Lakes Dredge & Dock, also finished saving at least 900 mature corals that they relocated in an artificial sanctuary as required by the Army Corps of Engineers.
"Taxpayers would be paying $50,000 to $100,000 a day to keep that dredge on standby and that's not happening," corps spokeswoman Susan Jackson told Reuters, explaining why they refused to give the researchers more time.
On the other hand, Colin Ford, marine biologist and one of the founders of Coral Morphologic told Reuters that their team saved 2,000 corals in the span of two weeks. They believed though that they could take more corals if they had a couple more weeks' time. But the U.S Army denied the extension request.
According to Daily Digest, the $150 million dredging project will resume despite allegations made by the scientists claiming that the environmental studies conducted in the area failed to provide a correct estimate on the extent of the damage that dredging would impose to the coral reefs. Some of these corals were more than 40 years old.
"There are just thousands of corals out there, so it's really a mammoth task," said Andrew Baker, a University of Miami professor and coral biologist who researches the effects of warming oceans and acidification on coral, to Miami Herald. "This could be the seed population for climate-tolerant corals, and we're wiping them out by literally blowing them up."
