Judge asked to halt dredges during sea turtle nesting season

A conser vation group is asking a judge to stop a federal agency from dredging a Georgia harbor during the nesting season for rare sea turtles

SAVANNAH — A conservation group filed suit asking a judge to stop a federal agency from dredging a Georgia harbor during the nesting season for rare sea turtles that began over the weekend.

The group One Hundred Miles filed suit Friday in U.S. District Court against the Army Corps of Engineers, which plans to end a policy that for 30 years suspended coastal dredging from the Carolinas to Florida during the warmer months when sea turtles are most abundant in coastal waters and lay their eggs on Southern beaches.

Those seasonal windows have been credited with minimizing deaths and injuries to sea turtles by dredges that suck up sediments to clear waterways used by commercial ships. But the Army Corps plans to scrap them after federal scientists last year concluded that sea turtles protected by the Endangered Species Act can likely endure 150 deaths annually from yearround dredging.

Citing concerns by biologists with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, the federal lawsuit says opening the state’s 100-mile (160-kilometer) coast to year-round dredging for the first time since 1991 “would almost certainly kill and injure federally threatened and endangered sea turtles.”

“We’re certainly not about to sit back as they come in and endanger Georgia’s sea turtles and throw away nearly 60 years of conservation progress in Georgia,” said Catherine Ridley, a One Hundred Miles vice president who coordinates volunteers to monitor sea turtle nests on St. Simons Island.

Billy Birdwell, a spokesman for the Army Corps in Savannah, said the agency does not comment on pending litigation.

Giant loggerhead sea turtles, protected as a federally threatened species, nest during the spring and summer months on beaches from North Carolina to Florida. Smaller numbers of endangered green and Kemp’s ridley sea turtles lay eggs in the region as well.

Ap-andy Newman In this photo provided by the Florida Keys News Bureau, Bette Zirkelbach, front left, and Richie Moretti, front right, manager and founder respectively of the Florida Keys-based Turtle Hospital, release “Sparb,” a sub-adult loggerhead sea turtle April 22 at Sombrero Beach in Marathon, Fla.