Colonel’s Island, Brunswick's deepwater port, a division of the Georgia Ports
Authority, is located 12 miles landward from the open Atlantic Ocean. Currently,
a 250 feet wide shipping channel is maintained at a depth of 30 ft. (at mean low
tide). Since the new Sidney Lanier Bridge, over the Brunswick River, was opened
in April 2003, access to the Brunswick Port is now available to much larger
ships. The new bridge has a vertical height clearance of 185 feet (at mean high
tide which changes 6 to 8 ft twice daily). In addition, the shipping channel is
currently being dredged to a depth of 36 feet and being widened to 500 feet.
The rivers and sounds separating the mainland from Georgia's barrier islands
are part of the Intercoastal Waterway serving the Eastern Seaboard. This
strategic waterway provides a flexible, low cost mode of transporting basic raw
materials and other bulk loading commodities.
Port of Brunswick facilities include the Colonels Island Terminal, Mayors
Point Terminal and Marine Port Terminal. Colonels Island Terminal is a
dual-purpose 345-acre terminal. Colonels Island features roll-on/roll-off and
dry bulk facilities. Three world-class auto processors are located on site to
provide services for inbound and outbound automotive shipments. The port
operated Colonels Island Terminal agri-bulk facility features a maximum storage
capacity of 2.0 million bushels in combined storage. On-site switching services
are performed by Golden Isles Terminal Railroads, Inc. with connection to
Norfolk Southern and CSX Transportation. Commodities handled:
Automobiles/Machinery/Dry Agricultural products in bulk.
Colonel’s Island also is home to the United States Geological Survey’s Deep
Well Test.
The development of an approximately 2-1/2 square-mile plume of high-chloride
water in the Upper Floridan aquifer in an area of downtown Brunswick, Georgia,
suggests that saltwater contamination is due to upward intrusion of saline water
from a more deeply buried source Lower Floridan aquifer. To better understand
the hydrogeology and geochemistry of the in carbonate Floridan aquifer system,
the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) drilled a 2,720-foot-deep test well in 1978 on
Colonels Island, about three miles west-southwest of downtown Brunswick.
Data from water samples collected during the drilling of the Colonels Island
test well (TW-26) indicate the presence of two interfaces in the Fernandina
permeable zone of the Lower Floridan aquifer having distinctly higher salinity
with increasing depth. Below a depth of 2,145 ft, chloride concentration first
exceeds the maximum detected in the Upper Floridan aquifer in downtown Brunswick
(2,600 milligrams per liter), and below 2,315 ft, chloride concentration exceeds
16,500 milligrams per liter. This zone is the probable source of the
high-chloride water in the Upper Floridan aquifer in Brunswick. Acoustic
televiewer (ATV), caliper, and neutron logs reveal that numerous layers within
the Floridan aquifer system have sizable dissolution cavities, which often are
adjacent to layers of relatively non-porous limestone or dolomite. Dissolution
may increase as ground water fills openings caused by fracturing of brittle,
non-porous carbonates, and probably provides conduits for the movement of large
volumes of ground water.
The original USGS drilling project was jointly funded by the USGS and the
Georgia Department of Natural Resources; and the current USGS project, which
continues ground-water-data collection and analysis, is jointly funded by the
USGS, the City of Brunswick, and Glynn County, Georgia.
Reference:
United States Geological Survey
Camden JDA
Brunswick Georgia Authority
|
