Fish may hold key to lock's upgrade

A stalled effort to renovate New Savannah Bluff Lock and Dam might get funding help from an unlikely source: the planned expansion of Savannah Harbor 200 miles downstream.

• Photos

Staff

The Army Corps of Engineers will release a draft Environmental Impact Statement this fall outlining preferred mitigation alternatives for the planned expansion of Savannah Harbor, and the building of a fish ladder at New Savannah Bluff may be formally recommended.

The 71-year-old Army Corps of Engineers dam near Augusta needs $22 million in renovations before it can be turned over to local governments to manage as a water supply structure.

Although Congress authorized the repair project in 2000, it never funded the repairs -- and no appropriations are in sight.

But last week the dam came up during a stakeholder discussion of the proposed expansion of Savannah Harbor, which the Georgia Ports Authority wants to deepen to 48 feet.

Among a host of environmental concerns aired by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service were the project's negative impact on striped bass populations and on the shortnose sturgeon, an endangered species that swims upriver to spawn in the Augusta shoals.

New Savannah Bluff effectively blocks the sturgeon's migration, and the corps proposed funding a fish passage device on the South Carolina side of the dam as part of the mitigation plan for the harbor project.

"We're talking a lot of ifs here, but if that becomes an accepted mitigation plan, the funding for it (the fish ladder) would be part of the Savannah Harbor Expansion," corps spokesman Billy Birdwell said Monday.

He noted, however, that the harbor expansion is a separate funding stream from the hoped-for renovation funds for the entire lock and dam. As such, the mitigation funds from the harbor project would cover only the fish passage segment of the Lock & Dam rehabilitation, he said.

According to the plan presented last week, the fish passage would involve a horseshoe-shaped, 75-foot-wide ramp with 9-inch ledges that would allow fish to bypass the dam and move upstream.

If successful, the proposal said, it would reopen more than 20 miles of river habitat to fish spawning -- including the oxygen rich shoals upstream from Augusta.

Mr. Birdwell said the mitigation alternatives being discussed are far from final, but could be included in the corps' draft Environmental Impact Statement scheduled to be released for a public comment period this fall.

"We still have the EIS process to go through and this is just one of the things we're looking at," he said. "No mitigation has been set in stone yet."

In 1999, the corps proposed demolishing New Savannah Bluff Lock and Dam because it no longer supported commercial shipping -- the purpose for which it was built in 1937.

Efforts to save the dam -- and its 13-mile pool of water tapped by industries and cities -- yielded a congressional decree that it be repaired and turned over to local municipalities to maintain.

Reach Rob Pavey at 868-1222, ext. 119, or rob.pavey@augustachronicle.com.