by Peter Hildebrandt
  Dredging might not be an activity most associate with a clean environment, but Hap Cameron, director of marine operations for Cline Construction, feels strongly that dredging is a good tool for cleaning up the environmental mistakes of the past. In the course of his operations he’s witnessed firsthand the improvement in marine habitats he’s worked on.
  “We can go into a marina where the water appears lifeless; you see no shrimp, fish or any real movement. Subsequently we’ll go in and dredge the same marina and by the time we’re done it has blossomed with life,” he said. “I find the impact incredible.” Dredging the life-choking silt out of a marine environment can revive the area.
 Cline Construction is a general contractor in Palm Coast, FL involved in land development, marine construction and marine engineering. Their marine operations involve mechanical dredging. Some of their mechanical dredging is done from the shoreline with a long reach back hoe, but most is done from barge mounted rigs Cline Construction owns for this work.
  Hap Cameron first met Sam Cline, owner of Cline Construction, in 1979. They’ve been working together off and on ever since. Cameron has been involved in domestic and international construction for 44 years. He’s worked in the northeast and southeast U.S. as well as in Egypt for 14 years, Qatar, Russia and Puerto Rico for a total of 17 years outside the U.S.
  Strong Environmental Awareness
  One of Cameron and Cline’s earliest projects together was building a canal system and storm drainage system for the city of Palm Coast, a brand new development under construction at that time. Planning for Palm Coast started in the mid 1960s. Cameron considers Palm Coast one of the best, completely planned communities in the world.
  A few decades later, Cline Construction was incorporated in 1996 and started their dredging operations in 2000. “The dredging we are involved with in this area of the country is an environmental issue,” says Cameron. “It involves a great deal of environmental clean up.”
 Cline Construction works in both salt and freshwater. The dredging Cline does throughout Florida involves a great deal of work with silt. “The waterways around here are choked with silt from the rooftops, roads and parking lots all across this region of the state,” explains Cameron. “For that reason, I consider stormwater retention ponds to be a brilliant invention. Those structures are critical to a healthy environment and the genius of the ponds is its subtle approach to preventing pollution.”
  Stormwater retention ponds catch the runoff and cause settlement akin to a primary treatment of the solids. Then it is possible to go back with equipment, clean the pond out and keep it operating as it should be operating. “For the past 100 years, everything went into the local waterways,” says Cameron. “Therefore we have extreme amounts of silt; entire communities are drained into the area’s waterways. A good example is the Halifax River in the Daytona Beach area.”
  Most of the stormwater from U.S. Highway 1 runs directly into the river; a great deal of material that starts with huge quantities of rubber from tires worn down on the road each year. Highway U.S. 1, which runs from Maine to Key West, FL, has few stormwater treatment facilities other than new facilities that have been built recently, according to Cameron. Almost everything that runs off of the rooftops and road runs directly into the waterways.
 Dredging in the state is regulated by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, or St. Johns River Water Management District and the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers. At one project Cline is currently involved with in Sebastian, FL, they’re working on a system tht has not been maintained for about 40 years. The bulkheads are failing on both sides of the storm water treatment canal, which in effect is a very long retention pond. The site has 29,200-cubic yards of sediment Cline Construction will be removing. They’ll also be restabilizing the shoreline with brand new bulkheads. (When the operations involve saltwater the bulkheads would be called seawalls.)
  Cline Construction moves thousands of yards of sediment on each project they tackle. Typically, they will dredge out marinas silted in, or dredge shoals when necessary for navigation on the river. In order to process the silt and materials removed during their dredging operations, they will take it back to a local quarry or borrow pit. There it is blended with other soils, for other materials and then gets pressed back into service, used as recycled material such as yard fill, structural, or if it’s silty enough they can mix it with crushed or recycled concrete. Cameron finds the material hardens up very well.
  “We try to remain green through all of our efforts,” adds Cameron, “but to some extent it’s also a very expensive process. We dredge the material, place it on scow barges, take the material to the shore, unload it, stack it to dewater and then load it on trucks to haul it to a recycling pit.”
  They have several different rigs set up all the time. These include a 24-cubic yard scow barge for clearing the narrow canals and small residential dredging and a 90-cubic yard large production barge. The back hoe and materials all set on the deck of the production barge. For other jobs with a high volume and long travel distance, one barge will be set up for the backhoe and scows are shuttled to and from the main barge.
  They use long reach excavators. The fleet they’ve built up over the years is now all Kobelco equipment, including a Kobelco SK-250 with a 60-foot long reach as well as a Kobelco SK-60, which they’ve built a custom boom with a 33-foot long reach. Cameron runs the operations and specially trained operators run the equipment.
  When dredging involves an ocean channel or inlet where the sand has closed things off, the sand — if it’s high enough in quality — will go back on the beach. If it’s not high enough quality to be returned to the beach, it is taken to a facility for processing and sale. Cline Construction just finished a dredging job for the city of Jacksonville in which they took 48,000-cubic yards of stormwater sediment out of a major stormwater treatment facility. “Most of what we clean up is the general public’s accumulated silts,” says Cameron. “It’s taken five or six generations to get to the place where we are today. We’ll never run out of work, as it may take another ten generations to clean up all these years of storm water runoff from rooftops, roads, interstates and parking lots, even if all the runoff was completely stopped today.”
  At the Conch House Marina in St. Augustine they removed some 30,000-cubic yards of material. Other dredging projects include the Caribbean Jacks, Marina in Daytona Beach, Sunset Harbor Yacht Club, Inlet Harbor Marina and a side channel dredging for Volusia County. They also do a great deal of residential dredging.
 The dredging they do, for the most part, is privately funded, rather than from funds supplied by the state of Florida or local governments. Cameron feels this is important work. “It’s cleaning up these environmental problems  we’ve created over the past 100 year by the general public; there is a great deal of public benefit by the work that we do,” explains Cameron. “The Atlantic Intercoastal Waterways Association lobbies Congress to supply the Army Corps of Engineers with funds to keep the waterways open. Many of our waterways are in rough shape. The Intercoastal Waterway itself was forced to close down in certain areas due to shoaling in at certain areas. There was no public money available to dredge these sections out. Despite the push to get this done and the critical nature of this situation, there never seems to be enough money to accomplish the dredging.”
  In Florida the Inland Navigational District collects revenue from property owners for dredging. “To my knowledge, Florida is the only state operating such a fund. The regulatory bodies in the state make it difficult to obtain permits for dredging and that’s a shame. I have always applauded private efforts, as that is private dollars accomplishing something which should be done with public funds.”
  The Right Kind of Dredging
  A dredging operation called clam shelling features the dropping of a large bucket hanging from the boom of a crane. It opens, is dropped and then sinks into the bottom strata. As it is picked up it closes, drawing up the sediment. Clam shell dredging has become controversial because of the concern in Florida for the manatee population. A bucket falling on a manatee could injure or kill the mammal instantly. Efforts to conserve the manatee population have been very successful and their numbers have rebounded, according to Cameron.
  But this has also led to difficulties for dredging operations. Now work must be shut down for months at a time when manatees may be in the area. “But the type of dredging we do, using the excavator is very up close and personal, so to speak,” says Cameron. “We’ve never had a problem with manatees — quite the contrary. In fact when we did the side channel dredging for the Volusia County Port Authority, within 53 days we had 250 sightings of manatees in the area. We had to shut down our operations numerous times until the manatees moved out of the immediate danger area. The Volusia County manatee watcher kept a detailed record of all of this.
  “If you look up the statistics on the Florida Fish and Wildlife Web site, you’ll see that the majority of manatee deaths occur at birth, followed by deaths from cold stress and sickness,” adds Cameron. “I feel the human impact on them has been overstated. No one out there is an intentional manatee killer. Many of the deaths are accidental or incidental. But this has had a huge impact on the marine construction and the marine dredging industries. We just try to raise awareness of the fact that the type of dredging we do is not the type harmful to manatees.”
  There are three different types of dredging. Hydraulic, involving a cutting head on the end of a pipe and a pump. This is used for huge bulk jobs. Mechanical or clamshell dredging drops a 10,000-pound bucket with its jaws open, to the bottom of the water body. The third class is the type Cline Construction does, involving excavators. They have done some clam shell dredging, but their preferred method is mechanical dredging with excavators.
  By special invitation, Cline Construction has taken some individuals involved in regulatory agencies out to projects to demonstrate how they work.
  “It’s an educational process. Everybody seemed to think the only mechanical dredging ever done was clamshell and that was extremely dangerous to manatees. In any case, clamshell dredging is not the preferred technique here in Florida. Typically, Cline Construction takes on projects no more than 12-feet deep.”
  Working with Regional Agencies
  Paul Haydt works as a senior project manager for the Northern Coastal Basin SWIM (Surface Water Improvement and Management) Program for St. Johns River Management District. Haydt’s program has provided funds and guidance to local communities for cleaning up storm water before it reaches the waterways. He also supports selected dredging of accumulated sediments as part of comprehensive restoration efforts to re-establish and maintain sustainable shoreline and intertidal habits along the water’s edge.
  “A lot of the Intercoastal Waterway is referred to as the ‘ditch’ because back in the 1920s there was a canal authority which dug it the first time,” says Cameron. “Then the Corps of Engineers took it over and expanded it in the 1950s, so there is a lot of raw shoreline along the Intercoastal Waterway that hasn’t been stabilized. That material is constantly washing down into the channel.”
  Haydt and Cameron have been working on a program called SHRIMP — Shoreline and Habitat Restoration and Management Plan — to guide riverfront development, redevelopment and restoration initiatives. As the name implies, SHRIMP works to develop techniques and utilize best management practices to reduce shoreline wave energies sufficient to allow the establishment of sustainable emergent vegetation and submerged shoreline habitats. “There once again, we are encouraging private developers to go ahead and use their dollars to restore the shorelines so they are not sloughing into the Intercoastal and not choking out the life on the river bottom.
  “There are a lot of folks out there, with a lot of different perspectives, some with funds that are trying to make a real difference in this region of Florida. The support of many is what’s important, along with the various outlooks. Just because I think something’s right, doesn’t make it right. It’s a team effort in coming up with solutions.”
  For now, Hap Cameron is pleased to be doing work that is part of the solution. It also helps that he truly loves his work