A planned expansion of the Port of Wilmington’s harbor to better accommodate larger vessels could have troubling impacts on wildlife, ecosystems, and people, advocates say.
The Wilmington Harbor Navigation Improvement Project is a proposed expansion of the Wilmington Navigational Harbor which would deepen the harbor from 42 to 47 feet by dredging the Cape Fear River. While the North Carolina Port Authority argues that the expansion is necessary to better accommodate larger vessels and maintain the Port of Wilmington’s competitiveness with other East Coast ports, local environmental groups have raised significant concerns regarding the project’s potential effects on flooding, wildlife, and PFAS contamination.
According to the North Carolina Department of Transportation, North Carolina’s ports contribute about $16.1 billion annually to the state economy. The Port of Wilmington is by far the larger contributor of the state’s two major ports, bringing in $14.8 billion in comparison to the Port of Morehead City’s $1.3 billion. But North Carolina has long struggled to keep up with other, larger ports across the Southeast, including the Port of Savannah, which was deepened to 47 feet in 2022. In 2024, Georgia’s ports contributed a total of $77 billion to its GDP, 9% of the state’s total.
The North Carolina Port Authority says that this project would help the Port of Wilmington catch up by allowing deep draft vessels to more efficiently navigate the harbor, attracting more import and export business and supporting the economy on the coast and beyond. According to the North Carolina State Ports Authority, the project would save $158.5 million per year in transportation costs, keeping Wilmington competitive with nearby ports.
“The containership fleet on the U.S. East Coast-Asia services will consist of neo-Panamax and new post-Panamax vessels, which would have a maximum operating draft of 41 feet at the Wilmington Harbor and 48 feet at other East Coast ports,” North Carolina Ports’ executive summary of the project’s Section 203 feasibility report reads. “If North Carolina Ports does not move forward with any navigational enhancements, these deep-draft containerships will be unable to reach the Port of Wilmington, and carriers will divert cargo to competitive ports. All competitive East Coast container ports are presently approved for depths of 47 feet or deeper.”
The project is expected to cost upwards of $1.35 billion in state and federal funds, according to the Draft Letter Report released by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Because the project is partially funded by the federal government, the Army Corps of Engineers is required to carry out an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) to identify the potential environmental impact under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. But the Draft EIS released Sept. 12, critics say, failed to adequately address key issues.
The plan preferred by the Army Corps of Engineers, which would deepen the Cape Fear River to 47 feet by dredging millions of cubic yards of sand, silt and rock, would allow larger tankers to enter the port at their full capacity, rather than having to reduce their load to avoid scraping the bottom. However, deepening and widening the river also increases the size of the tidal prism, or the amount of water that moves in and out of the mouth of the river with the tide. Kerri Allen, program director for the North Carolina Coastal Federation, said that this is likely to increase flooding in low-lying areas, including nuisance or “sunny day” flooding caused by high tides on days without significant precipitation.
“A lot of these areas that are frequently flooded are owned and lived in by more low-income populations, and so this quickly becomes an environmental justice issue,” Allen said. “These are the folks that have the fewest resources to fight or to express concerns about projects that directly impact them. And as we continue to see more storms coming on top of that, we have the potential for more flooding, more people to be put at risk.”
Similarly, increasing the volume of water exchanged between the Cape Fear River and the ocean would allow more saltwater to move upriver, contributing to the spread of ghost forests: swathes of dead trees where freshwater marshes have ceded to brackish water, killing trees and leaving markedly reduced biodiversity in their wake.
Andy Wood has worked in coastal conservation for decades, including all but single-handedly saving the magnificent ramshorn snail from extinction by breeding them in captivity in tanks outside his own home. The snail’s population was nearly eradicated by saltwater intrusion after a previous dredging project in the 1930s, but Wood says it isn’t the only species at risk.
“There are whole habitats that are disappearing under the flood of saltwater,” Wood, a conservation biologist and director for documentary production nonprofit Coastal Plain Conservation Group, said. “So, we’re talking not just about losing individual species that are found here in southeast North Carolina, but also entire habitats, whole ecosystems are being lost as a result of dredging what was originally a shallow river.”
The Cape Fear Arch is an ancient geological formation stretching from Cape Lookout in North Carolina to Cape Romain in South Carolina. Its slightly higher elevation has allowed the ecosystem to evolve for millions of years without repeated saltwater flooding, creating a mosaic of unique habitats that preserve endemic species like the Venus flytrap, but as rising sea levels and saltwater intrusion eat away at the edges of this ecosystem, those habitats could be lost for good.
“The only place in the world you can find Venus flytraps, magnificent ramshorn, broken-striped newts, Croatan crayfish, and numerous other plants and wildlife, the only place in the world you can find them, is right here in southeastern North Carolina, in a roughly 80-mile radius of Wilmington,” Wood said. “But you have to remember, half of that radius is ocean. We’re losing land. We’re not growing new land. And so that radius is shrinking rapidly: in some places, many feet per year.”
Bill Cary, an attorney representing the Village of Bald Head Island, said the previous deepening of the harbor in 2000 disrupted the system that naturally replenished the island’s beaches for hundreds of years, and that further dredging would only worsen the island’s erosion problems. While the Army Corps of Engineers did include a study of shoreline erosion in its environmental analysis, it did not study the offshore system that Bald Head Island relies on to replenish its beaches.
“Since 2020, Bald Head Island has spent $70 million trying to address the impacts to the beach from this deepening project,” Cary said. “They’ve built a terminal groin, they’ve done their own beach renourishment projects, and this new project does not go back and re-study that sand sharing system. It completely ignored it. We think that is an ecosystem that an EIS should study.”
The analysis also did not include any PFAS testing, raising additional concerns. The Cape Fear River is known to contain high levels of a number of different PFAS compounds, also known as “forever chemicals” for their ability to persist in the body. These chemicals, largely produced by the Chemours plant in Fayetteville, are known to be associated with increased cholesterol, low birth weight and other developmental effects in children, and some cancers. Despite concerns that the previously undisturbed sediment that would be dredged to deepen the harbor might contain high levels of PFAS, this was not included in the Army Corps of Engineers’ analysis.
Under the current environmental mitigation plan, about half of the material dredged for the project would be placed as a beneficial use to replenish wetland habitat, shore up eroding bird nesting islands, and renourish beaches in New Hanover and Brunswick Counties. While these projects would generally help restore and maintain vital habitat, Roger Shew, a recently retired professor of geology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, said he became concerned that despite PFAS being known to contaminate the sediment of the Cape Fear River, the Army Corps of Engineers wasn’t doing any testing to ensure that what would normally be a benefit to wildlife wouldn’t poison them instead.
“I believe, with the possible beneficial placement of 15 million cubic yards of dredged material, that you should know what’s in the sediment,” Shew said.
But when he raised that issue with the Army Corps, he said, they told him they couldn’t test for PFAS because they weren’t a regulated chemical.
In 2024, the EPA announced a new National Primary Drinking Water Regulation, which included standards for PFOA and PFOS, two of the most widely used and studied PFAS compounds. While the compliance date for public water systems was pushed back from 2029 to 2031 in May, it is still expected to go into effect. Because the project is not expected to be completed until the mid-2030s, this means that the compounds will likely be regulated during the dredging project’s construction.
“Even if you push it back to 2031, that means that that’s going to be a regulated chemical during their operation,” Shew said. “And so, what an EIS says is that you need to consider current and future implications for the area that you’re working in. I mean, that’s the basic core principle of an EIS. And so therefore I believe that since dredging will be done during that time when it is a regulated chemical, it’s obligatory that they consider that in the DEIS and the EIS moving forward.”
According to a statement by Jed Clayton, public affairs specialist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Wilmington District, those federal standards apply to drinking water, not sediment. He wrote that the project is not expected to impact PFAS levels in drinking water, but that sediment intended to be used for beneficial placement will be tested in accordance with the Marine Protection Research and Sanctuaries Act, and sediment placed elsewhere will be tested to meet federal and state regulations at the time of construction.
“Sediment test results have a limited shelf-life,” Clayton wrote. “Sediment test results collected now may not be used to support decisions related to actions performed in 2030-2035. Sediment testing would be performed to meet all applicable requirements and to support the associated decisions during the preconstruction Engineering and Design phase of the effort. The purpose of the draft EIS and LR is to provide an opportunity for stakeholders to provide feedback. Based on feedback received, additional clarity about potential PFAS-related impacts will be provided in the final EIS.”
Cary said that although the Army Corps of Engineers is required to perform an Environmental Impact Statement, its analysis doesn’t have to include everything. Under the recent Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County decision, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in May, federal agencies are given “substantial deference” in terms of what should be included in their analysis, and the courts should not “micromanage” their contents.
“It doesn’t have to get the analysis perfect. It doesn’t even have to get it right. It just has to take a hard look at it,” Cary said. “It can’t go blindly doing something without even considering the consequences.”
Critics also say that the project fails to justify itself economically. The Army Corps’ Draft Letter Report, which analyzes the feasibility of the project, does not project any additional cargo volume as a result of the expansion. Instead, the economic benefits come from efficiency, reducing costs for shipping companies.
The Draft Letter Report calculates a benefit-to-cost ratio to determine whether or not a project is economically feasible: If the value is greater than one, the project’s benefits outweigh its cost, and it is feasible to move forward. The Wilmington Harbor Navigation Improvement Project’s benefit-to-cost ratio is 1.3; for reference, the Savannah Harbor Expansion Project yielded a value of 7.3.
“This project barely pays for itself,” Cary said. “If they have miscalculated the costs, if the EIS has left out things that are going to [have an] impact, it makes a difference in the way that other projects don’t normally. It could make the project unfeasible.”
At the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management hearing about the project Nov. 17, representatives from Audubon North Carolina, the Southern Environmental Law Center and other groups argued that the environmental impacts posed by the project would far outweigh its potential benefits. While the public comment period for the Draft Environmental Statement has closed, another is currently open through Dec. 20 for the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Coastal Management as it considers whether the project is consistent with the state’s Coastal Zone Management Act.
Wood said the proposed port expansion was a symptom of a larger problem of disregarding the environment in favor of the economy rather than recognizing the connection between the two.
“What we have to remember with economics is the health and well-being of the environment is what determines the health and well-being of an economy,” Wood said. “It does not work the other way around.”
