Months of work by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to construct a giant sand-trap near Port Everglades to provide eroding beaches with a steady supply of sand has environmentalists, dive groups and residents crying foul.
As work proceeds, plumes of sand have clouded waters near endangered coral and conchs while noisy excavators drown out waves along the popular beach next to Port Everglades.
“It goes on 24-7,” said Maria Buchsbaum, whose beachfront Point of Americas condominium overlooks the work. “It was so bad when they would sometimes start at two in the morning that I'd wake up and I thought maybe a plane hit the building.”
READ MORE: Study surprises scientists with its findings: millions of coral at Port Everglades
Environmentalist and dive groups say the Corps is violating the Endangered Species Act by not incorporating recent findings by researchers on the alarming condition of endangered staghorn following a massive 2023 ocean heat wave. In October, researchers, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It declared staghorn functionally extinct after finding what may be the largest remaining stand of wild staghorn coral growing near the work.
In order to proceed, the groups say the Army Corps needs to go back to federal regulators to reconsider potential damage.
” It's critically important that we protect this reef from things like these dredging projects, because they are the last stronghold of these really critical species, and potentially a source of the populations rebounding and coming back,” said Miami Waterkeeper Executive Director Rachel Silverstein.
A rare group of baby-making queen conchs, which were added to the endangered species list in 2024, also live nearby. The herd is one of only two found to be reproducing in increasingly hotter Florida waters.
”That's really important because these aggregations are imperative for the species to recover,” said Alex Muir, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, which is representing the groups.
“T he Port Everglades aggregation is specifically important, like the National Marine Fishery Service has found, to repopulating and helping to recover Florida's nearshore population,” she said. ”The population right now that we have in Florida is not dense enough, and it's too degraded to repopulate or recover the species.”
The Army Corps declined to comment.
Broward County first obtained permission from the Army Corps four years ago to turn nearly 11 acres of ocean bottom into a sandtrap to use in beach restoration —overseen by the Army Corps — and began an initial dredge months later. The Corps permit allowed the county to work round the clock, seven days a week.
Because the work can churn up mud and sediment that can harm wildlife, the Army Corps consulted federal environmental regulators. NOAA then issued a report in 2020 and another in 2025, without addressing the new findings on coral. To determine what harm might occur by the project, wildlife officials must use the most recent research and then recommend ways to avoid harming the damage.
In the months since the work started, Capt. Bill Cole, who owns the Sea Experience dive boat and dive shop in Fort Lauderdale, has repeatedly encountered large plumes.
“The first time I saw it, one of the passengers on the boat said, ‘Oh, wow, look at the, look at the beautiful colors.’ And they were like, ‘It's just like The Bahamas,’" Cole said. “ It was like turquoise and like a whitish color. I said, ‘That's not beautiful. That's silt.’”
Almost twice a week, he has to to reroute dive trips on reefs, about three miles from Port Everglades where he’s been diving for nearly 50 years.
“It extended literally to the area where we go snorkeling, which is, I know, way farther than they're supposed to allow that silt to go,” he said. “ And it probably extended maybe a mile offshore. So it was a huge, huge plume that time.”
In April, the NOAA asked the Army Corps to take immediate action to fix the problem. NOAA also demanded that the Army Corps restart the environmental approval process given the dire findings about staghorn. A month later, Florida Department of Environmental Regulation biologists found damage to corals and sponges north of where the sand is being dug up. The corals and sponges had been dusted with the silty mud from the dredge. The biologists reported that some had closed shut or spit out mucus to try to clear the mud.
“We know what happens to reefs when sediment from a dredging project kicks up these huge plumes that eventually settles out and can bury a reef,” Silverstein said, referring to the Port Miami dredge in 2014 that killed acres of coral. “It had absolutely catastrophic consequences for the reef. Likely millions of corals were buried in dredging sediment, and at least 278 acres of the reef was buried, and it has still largely never been fixed.”
Like Port Miami, Port Everglades is also slated to undergo a much larger dredging to deepen its channel. But in April the US Army Corps of Engineers unexpectedly withdrew a critical permit for that dredge, saying the scope of the work had changed
For residents — many active retirees at the Point of Americas who treasure the beach — the round-the-clock work has become a grating aggravation. They say they contacted county officials and the Corps, without getting much relief.
“Everybody wants to work together to solve this, to come up with a solution. The residents have been like, ‘What can we do to help?... Let's all work together on this,'" said Suzee Bailey, who founded the nonprofit Residents 4 Resilience to find nature-based solutions to fight climate change and other environmental impacts. “The hardest part of this whole thing is sometimes just getting ignored.”
Responding to WLRN, Broward County said it acknowledges that dredging has been a disruption to residents and cited extensive public outreach before the project began. They added that dredging operations are currently paused for the coral spawning window. They said they will complete the project in compliance with all state and federal permits.
Waterkeeper, the Florida Wildlife Federation and the Diving Equipment and Marketing Association say they intend to sue the Army Corps in early August if the agency fails to reopen environmental reviews. The deadline for the Army Corps to respond is Aug. 4.
