Posted on January 22, 2025
FAIRFIELD — After months of waiting with multiple delays, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and its high-demand dredging boat have arrived to widen the mouth of Southport Harbor.
The harbor’s dredging is a long-awaited federal project that will dig up a corner of a shoal sticking into the harbor from the edge of Sasco Beach to clear a 100-foot channel allowing boaters to sail in and out more safely and easily.
A three-man crew from Vicksburg, Miss. has spent the past week stockpiling mounds of sand along the harbor’s edge with excavators and a bulldozer. A 551-ton vessel called the “Dredge Murden” will be hauling it offshore and dumping it into the Long Island Sound, likely through the weekend, according to the Army Corps of Engineers.
“Had the channel continued to fill in, the boating activity would have probably decreased dramatically because nobody would be able to get in and out except at high tide,” said Kim Taylor, a former chair of Fairfield’s Harbor Management Commission who has led much of the local coordination with the Army Corps of Engineers for the project.
The widespread demand for the Dredge Murden up and down the East Coast and as far south as the Gulf of Mexico has stalled the Southport Harbor’s dredging, which was initially tabbed to take place about a year ago. The project’s timeline remained uncertain in October due to competing projects with a limited window for its dredging season, which lasts from October through January.
With roughly two weeks until that season ended, the Dredge Murden coasted into Southport shortly before 1 p.m. Thursday. Its arrival signaled the $1.2 million project years in the making had come to fruition, as about 20,000 cubic yards of sand waited to be whisked away from the underbelly of the local boating scene.
Don Hyman, the secretary of Fairfield’s Harbor Management Commission, watched excitedly from the Ye Yacht Yard as the U.S. Army vessel inched its way toward the piles of sand that land crews had already prepared. Their excavators parked near the edge of the man-made sand hills waited to scoop them up and drop them into the dredge.
“It’s been all up and down the East Coast of the United States doing exactly what it’s doing here — making harbors safe,” Hyman said Wednesday.
Coral Siligato, the project manager for the Army Corps of Engineers, said crews will work around the clock daily to continue hauling sand offshore on the Dredge Murden until the work is finished. She said six to seven people will work on the boat at any given time, their work split between a day and a night shift.
Siligato said the soil’s dumping grounds will eventually host an oyster bed as part of a shellfish pilot study with Connecticut’s Bureau of Aquaculture, which plans to lay oyster shells there as a future habitat this summer.
Taylor, the former Harbor Management Commission chair, said the Army Corps of Engineers also had to take stock of endangered plant species at the site of its dredging work, where she and other locals helped them relocate plants onto the Country Club of Fairfield’s property 20 or 30 yards away.
Fairfield last dredged Southport Harbor roughly a decade ago, when the town excavated about 6,500 cubic yards of sand after Hurricane Sandy and placed it along its beaches, according to a fact sheet by the Army Corps of Engineers.
But the harbor’s most recent dredging by the Army Corps of Engineers came about 20 years ago when the agency removed about 56,700 cubic yards of sand and silt between 2004 and 2005, the fact sheet states.
Over recent years, the gradual buildup of sand at the bottom of the easterly shoal has narrowed and shallowed the harbor channel. Southport Harbor Master Bryan LeClerc said the depth of the harbor has prevented two-way boat traffic at some points of the tide cycle, caused some to run aground and forced “evasive action” from others to avoid collisions.
“The condition up to now has gotten to the state where dredging is essential to maintain safe and efficient navigation and to allow vessels to proceed into and from the harbor and Long Island Sound,” LeClerc said.
He said after the dredging project is complete, the harbor’s channel should be roughly twice its former size with enough room for three boats to pass at once, even closer to low tide. He said the harbor’s history as a recreational and commercial passageway dates back to the 1700s, when boats would hoist cargo from farms to ports and shipyards would manufacture vessels of all sizes.
LeClerc added that dredging has had a similarly far-reaching history in the channel, where oxen once dragged buckets to scoop up sand.
He hopes the wait for the harbor’s next round of dredging lasts fewer than 20 years and said portions of the channel further inland, and before that, out into the sound would be due next for excavation.
Excavators transfer sand from the eastern sandbar along the mouth of Southport Harbor onto the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Dredge Murden, in Fairfield, Conn. Jan. 17, 2025.
