ARTIFICIAL REEF TO AID INTRACOASTAL SEA LIFE
Southern Boulevard bridge demolition providing the materials fisheries need.
WEST PALM BEACH — Road improvements along Southern Boulevard are indirectly helping to reinvigorate the sea life in the Intracoastal Waterway.
At least 6,000 tons of demolition material from the Southern Boulevard Bridge project is being used to create an artificial reef in the Lake Worth Lagoon. The new 2-acre reef will serve as a habitat for fisheries.
Under an agreement with the Department of Transportation, all material taken from the deconstruction of bridges within the county is given to Palm Beach County Environmental Resource Management to be used as reef material.
“It’s clean concrete, which is a great surface for marine life to grow on,” said Jena McNeal, environmental analyst-Artificial reef coordinator with Palm Beach County Environmental Resource Management. “We are going to make 30 pods of stacked material and, between the pilings and the deck pieces stacked opposite of each other in the pods, it creates really great ledges and nooks and crannies for fish and marine life to grow on and in.”
The 30 pods will be spaced 30 feet apart to induce fish channels that will attract snook as well as other sea creatures. The exact location for the artificial reef, an old dredge hole in the lagoon, was specifically chosen.
“Humans had come in and dredged the area beyond suitable depth for lagoon species,” McNeal said. “The hole here is about 2 acres in size and, at its deepest point, it’s a little over 30 feet deep. There’s nothing growing because that’s too deep for sea grass to grow, so we are going to insert this artificial reef and create a substrate for marine life and fish to come into and use.”
“It’s going to be a large area that we hope to see completely loaded with fish within the next two to three years,” McNeal said.
The project, which started Monday but got fully under way Tuesday, is anticipated to last through August.
It requires the use of a barge, a crane and a fixed buoy that assists with the marking and guiding needed for proper placement of the demolition material. The contractor for the Southern Boulevard Bridge Replacement Project, Johnson Bros., is tasked with delivering and depositing bridge materials to the artificial reef location.
A project of this type is not a first in the county.
“FDOT has collaborated with Palm Beach County ERM on several bridge replacement projects, providing bridge demolition materials from both the Royal Park Bridge and Flagler Memorial Bridge that were used to construct several offshore and inshore artificial reefs,” said Angel Streeter Gardner, community outreach specialist for FDOT.
For its part, the ERM has created seven other artificial reefs within the county’s lagoons. As as result of their work, ERM officials say they’ve seen more oysters and an increase in snook and bonefish populations.