The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has scrapped plans to build a salt marsh in West Haven that would have used enough material dredged from New Haven Harbor to fill 200 Olympic-size pools. nstead, the more than 650,000 cubic yards of silt and clay originally slated for the salt marsh at West Haven’s Sandy Point will be spread among three other sites — including two underwater “borrow pits” — as part of the Corps’ $84 million effort to deepen and widen the harbor’s shipping channel for larger vessels, according to a project official. That stronger containment, he said, would have made the salt marsh more engineered and less natural, required more long-term maintenance and nearly tripled the construction cost, from $7.4 million to $20.6 million. New Haven Harbor is the largest port in Connecticut and the second largest in New England, behind Boston Harbor. But it’s not deep enough to accommodate larger cargo ships, forcing them to off-load outside the channel. The dredging project aims to deepen the main shipping channel by 5 feet and widen the waterway basin so ships can more easily maneuver in and out. More than 4.6 million cubic yards of material is slated to be dredged from the harbor.
Revised New Haven Harbor plan reduces dredging disposal sites in Long Island Sound
