Gore Praises Oakland Port Project to Restore Wetlands

An innovative project that will take excess mud from the Port of Oakland and use it to restore wetlands in the Sonoma Bay won rave reviews from Vice President Al Gore on Monday.

The project will boost port business by creating deeper shipping channels, help the environment, create jobs and serve as a national model of civic, business and conservationist cooperation, Gore said.

“It is a win-win-win-win deal,” he said.

Problems at the port stem from the fact that its main shipping channels are only 38 feet deep at their shallowest points, meaning modern super-size container ships need to wait for high tide to come in and out.

Efforts to deepen channels to 42 feet stalled for lack of a place to put the dredged mud after the old method of simply dumping it at sea became environmentally unacceptable.

Delays on finding alternative sites--dating back at least 20 years--had created a “mudlock” that threatened the area’s maritime survival, said Walter Abernathy, president of the Bay Dredging Action Coalition, which includes environmentalists, labor, shipping lines and ports.

But the project got a push last summer when President Clinton instructed the regulatory agencies and the Army Corps of Engineers to “get on with it.”

Since then, three disposal sites have been identified, the biggest being the Sonoma Baylands, which will get about 2.6 million cubic yards of mud to restore a 300-acre tidal marsh. An additional 1.4 million cubic yards will go to improve an Oakland golf course and 1.7 million cubic yards will be dumped at sea.

The mud to be transferred has been tested and does not show hazardous levels of contamination, port officials said.

The dredging project is expected to cost $137.5 million, two-thirds of that federal funds, and will take up to two years to complete, according to the port.

Officials expect to solicit bids on the first phase of the dredging project by December, although some permit hurdles remain and agreements have yet to be signed with the port and other state and regional agencies, said port spokesman Bob Middleton.

Documents filed so far do not indicate any major hitches, Middleton said.

In a lighter mood, Gore illustrated the coalition’s unstoppable attitude with a story about an Oklahoma oil rig fire. The blaze, he said, was so fierce it kept city and county departments at bay. But a volunteer company drove its truck past the cordon of watchers, charged up to the rig and put the fire out. A grateful owner promptly wrote the company a $10,000 check, which led a reporter to ask the chief how he planned to spend it.

“He said, ‘Well, I guess we’ll take it and take this truck here and take it back and get the brakes fixed,” Gore said.