COMMENTARY | More than a century of dredging the St. Johns River has intensified storm surge for inland areas even miles away from the Atlantic Ocean, including downtown Jacksonville, and likely has left the city more vulnerable to flooding in major hurricanes, according to a peer-reviewed study published this month by three civil engineering researchers focusing entirely on the St. Johns.
The paper complicates the consequence-free narrative pushed by the Jacksonville Port Authority and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as the agencies claw even deeper into miles of river bed on their latest project dredging the 40-foot shipping channel to 47 feet. The Army Corps has never studied the cumulative effects that more than 100 years of dredging and other man-made alterations to the river have had on the environment and on the city s flood risk, but the agency has argued in public documents and in court the current seven-foot project would have virtually negligible impacts.
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