By Dan Tonsmeire, Cameron Baxley, Doug Alderson, and Georgia Ackerman
***Updated 10/24/2025*** The USACE Mobile District is considering thereinstatement of navigational dredging of the Apalachicola River, below Woodruff Dam, south to the “Pinhook” of the Apalachicola River. Background information on the project can be viewed HERE. A recording of the August 12 Virtual Public meeting is also available.
Learn more about the USACE’s history of dredging on the Apalachicola River in the short video below.
From the early 1960’s through the early 2000’s, the U.S. Army Corps (“the Corps”) of Engineers attempted to maintain a 100-foot wide by nine-foot-deep channel for commercial barge traffic for 90 percent of the year. After more than 40 years, the channel was determined to be economically infeasible and environmentally unsustainable and unacceptable. The Corps’ authorization was denied by the State of Florida in 2005.
As a result of the dredging, the riverbed and banks became destabilized and the hydrological connections that connected the river to the floodplain were severely altered, causing changes to the vegetation and fish and wildlife habitat. Life-giving nutrients provided to the Apalachicola Bay from the backwater swamps were significantly reduced.In short, navigation dredging caused tremendous damage to the health of the Apalachicola River and its floodplain. This also resulted in harm to the Apalachicola Bay.
Because of the Corps’ past record along the river—the years of destructive navigational dredging in pursuit of an effort to commercialize a low-traffic river, and the Corps’ failure to restore sloughs and other damage caused by dredging—Apalachicola Riverkeeper strongly opposes any return to navigational dredging by the Army Corps of Engineers.
After a 20-year reprieve from the dredging activities and funding from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation in cooperation with federal, state and local governments, Apalachicola Riverkeeper has been restoring the natural river connections and functions on three sloughs (Douglas Slough, Spider Cut, and East River).
Timeline of Apalachicola River Navigation and Dredging
- For millennia, indigenous people have used the Apalachicola River as a vital transportation corridor. Several villages were established along its shores.
- In the 1820s, shallow draft steamboats started plying the muddy waters of the Apalachicola, carrying both goods and passengers. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Army Corps of Engineers began widening, straightening, snagging, and dredging the Apalachicola River and its tributaries to improve navigability, primarily for the regional timber and cotton market.
- However, the Corps and regional boosters overestimated the potential of Apalachicola, and by the early twentieth century, railroads and other transportation networks rendered the port of Apalachicola commercially obsolete.
- Although brief periods of heightened commercial activity occurred throughout the mid- to late 1900s, the Corps’ economic vision for the Apalachicola River never fully materialized. Notwithstanding that lack of commercial success, in 1939 the U.S. Army Chief of Engineers proposed a dramatic expansion of efforts to establish commercial navigation on the Apalachicola. The River and Harbor Act of 1945 and 1946 enacted that vision and authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to create and maintain a nearly year-round (at least 95% of the time) 100-foot-wide by nine-foot-deep channel from Columbus, Georgia to Apalachicola.
- Flow was directed into a main channel by various types of dikes and embankments. Tight curves were eliminated through cutoffs and channel realignments. But even this surgery on the river proved insufficient for a year-round channel. The Corps, buoyed by influential upriver business leaders such as Jim Woodruff, believed that dams were required.
- The first of three federal dams built on the lower Chattahoochee was where the Flint and Chattahoochee Rivers joined together near the Florida/Georgia border. Completed in 1957, it was named for Jim Woodruff and it created the Lake Seminole reservoir. When the dam was built, the Corps promised it would provide a deep enough channel for year-round barge traffic on the Apalachicola River, bringing economic prosperity. Although relatively large in area, the lake’s capacity to store water for management purposes was limited because the topography of surrounding lands resulted in a relatively shallow reservoir. So, in the early 1970s, the Corps developed a plan for more dams and reservoirs downstream in Florida.
- Proposals for more dams on the Apalachicola River were stifled by an angry Florida coalition of fishermen, hunters, seafood workers, recreationists, environmentalists, scientists and political leaders. That left Jim Woodruff as the last dam in the broader tri-rivers basin.
- Because the Apalachicola is a coastal alluvial river with several reaches at or below sea level, it is constantly sedimenting. As a result, constant dredging and de-snagging operations were required to accommodate shipping on the Apalachicola River. Even then, drought periods were problematic. Navigation interests learned they needed much more flow in the river than what was originally projected, and average flow was declining, not rising. A similar problem has plagued river projects such as the Colorado.
- After the dam was built, river fishermen began complaining that the artificial water fluctuations often stranded fish spawning beds. And as a result of Corps dredging, biologists with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission documented a 75 percent reduction in sport fish population in areas covered with dredged sand.
- Dredging lowers the overall river level in the reaches where it occurs. During low water seasons, those lowered stages contribute to disconnecting the river from the floodplain—the wetlands that helped to feed the bay with water, nutrients and marine life. Thus, water filtering through the floodplain is reduced just when the bay needs it the most.
- That disconnection is greatly exacerbated by sediment from eroding dredge spoil mounds along the river. That sediment is deposited at the mouths of the sloughs and other connections between the river and floodplain, and often such sediment dams can extend a mile or more into sloughs.
- In the late 1980s, the state of Florida debated whether to renew a 25-year Corps dredging permit. Scientists pointed out that dredging destroyed fish habitat, blocked sloughs, and smothered fertile riverbanks with sand. Another reason was economics. The cost-benefit ratio of dredging for the estimated 500 barge trips on the river each year made the Apalachicola the most expensive waterway to maintain in the country. The Corps estimated dredging costs at $30,000 per barge from 1990 thru 2000.
- In 2005, Apalachicola Riverkeeper, in cooperation with Damayan Water Project, concluded that a navigable channel is available without dredging during a typical water year 4-5 months of the year and that dredging expanded the availability by only 30-45 days. It clearly showed that the navigational benefits of dredging were even less than previously thought.
- For several years, the state gave the Corps temporary dredging permits with the caveat that the Corps would restore slough openings partially blocked by dredging. However, it wasn’t until 2005 when the state refused to issue a permit altogether, noting that the Corps failed to maintain or restore sloughs impacted by 150 sites where dredge spoil was being deposited, adversely affecting recreation access and fish habitat, and water flowing into the bay from the floodplain.
- In 2017, Apalachicola Riverkeeper, Florida Wildlife Federation, and National Wildlife Federation filed suit against the Corps over the proposed updates to the Water Control Manual, which would worsen conditions for the Apalachicola River, especially during times of drought. The case remains in Federal Appeals Court. Alabama also filed suit.
- Today, training weirs are still visible along the river as well as the long sandbars created by navigational dredging. At low water, many sloughs are still clogged from past dredging, starving the floodplain of life-giving water.
- The three-story “Sand Mountain” below Wewahitchka, created by years of dredging and one which completely destroyed a slough, stands as a stark reminder of when the river was dredged. Early efforts to remove it failed. The sand is considered too coarse for beach renourishment and few plants grow on top. Sand Mountain continues to erode into the river, and that eroded sediment has completely changed the character of the river in the reach downstream of it..
- In 2020, Apalachicola Riverkeeper embarked on a multi-year effort to restore sloughs clogged by past dredging. Three initial sloughs were targeted—Douglas Slough, East River, and Spiders Cut, and more may follow. The work is ongoing.
- In 2025, the Corps initiated an Environmental Impact Statement to evaluate the potential resumption of navigational dredging operations in the ACF River Basin. There are many unknowns: How extensive would be the dredging? Would dredged material be removed from the Apalachicola River or disposed along the banks as before? Would the Corps restore sloughs and other damage caused by past dredging? Would dredging continue indefinitely?
- Because of the Corps’ past record along the river—the years of destructive navigational dredging in pursuit of an effort to commercialize a low-traffic river, and the Corps’failure to restore sloughs and other damage caused by dredging-Apalachicola Riverkeeper strongly opposes any return to navigational dredging by the Corps.
Apalachicola Riverkeeper is an independent, non-profit advocacy organization founded in 1998. Your financial gift fuels our fight to defend the Apalachicola River. Together, let’s work to protect and restore the Apalachicola River. Please donate today to fund our essential work on behalf of the Apalachicola River, Floodplain, and Bay.
