Posted on March 9, 2026
Dive shop owner Bill Cole leaned back in his captain’s chair, raised the volume on the Margaritaville radio station and watched six trails of bubbles trickle up through clear blue water.
Fifteen feet beneath the surface, divers drifted through one of the last thriving coral reefs in Florida, spotting juvenile parrotfish and grunts darting between branches of staghorn coral that survived the catastrophic heat waves and disease outbreaks that have rendered their species all but extinct in the continental United States.
But soon, this refuge could also be wiped out — not by hot-tub water temperatures or the mysterious plague of stony coral tissue loss disease, but by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Less than a mile away, the corps is planning to deepen and widen the shipping channel leading into Port Everglades, blasting through the reef line and dredging up sediment that could smother acres of surrounding coral, according to federal scientists.”
