Of all the East Coast port upgrade programs aimed at luring cargo traffic from the newly widened Panama Canal, the Savannah Harbor Expansion Project (SHEP) may well be the most ambitious, and complex. Elements of the joint effort by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Savannah District and the state of Georgia—originally estimated to cost $706 million, but subsequently increased to $973 million—range from 40 miles of channel dredging and new water quality mitigation facilities to the addition of an upstream fish passage and the recovery of a Civil War-era relic.
The project’s intricacies—and approximately half its cost—represent a strategy developed over 17 years to mitigate myriad environmental impacts from dredging nearly 24 million cu yd of material to lower the Savannah River’s shipping channel by 5 ft, creating a mean low-water depth of 47 ft suitable for larger, deep-draft vessels to access Savannah’s port facilities year-round.