Posted on August 13, 2020
With spring rains, melting snow, river backups and other environmental factors, sediment deposits in a river can make passage difficult for commercial traffic.
The Ohio River near Paducah is no exception, and for the past week, crews have been dredging local spots in order to make sure barges have enough clearance to pass easily through the area.
“Every year, the first thing we do in springtime is we do condition surveys,” said Tracey Keel, chief technical support for the Louisville District of the Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees waterway maintenance.
“We use those as a guide on where the sediment has fallen out and where it’s piling up.”
The western Ohio River can be particularly troublesome, because it collects significant sediment and debris from upriver.
Keel said especially when the Mississippi River backs up and the Ohio can’t flow into it freely, the local portion of the river can require multiple feet worth of dredging in trouble spots.
Some spots need to be dredged every year, but more commonly every few years.
“Paducah is a very high traffic area,” Keel said. “We keep a very close eye on it all the time.”
Keel said the federal requirement is to keep 9 feet of clearance below a low-water marker, but in recent years barges have needed more and more clearance, so the corps makes sure to provide about 12 feet of clearance.
Some areas of the Ohio locally have had so much sediment built up that only about 6 or 7 feet of clearance was available, Keel said.
He said the Louisville district performs more maintenance dredging than any other section of the Ohio River.
The corps currently contracts with Luhr Brothers, out of St. Louis, to perform the dredging, which is expected to be finished around today.
Keel said there’s never any predicting whether an area will need to be deepened at a particular time, which is why proactive monitoring is always necessary.
“Every year it’s always different. It’s never the same as it was the past year.”
Source: paducahsun
