Posted on May 8, 2017
By Robert McCabe, The Virginian-Pilot
Let’s journey to the underbelly of the waterfront, as it were, far from container and cruise ships, aircraft carriers and destroyers, tugs and barges, to vessels that are all about getting to the bottom of things: dredges.
They’re as much a part of the daily life of a bustling port as, say, vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers are in the world of homeowners.
Waterborne earthmovers, essentially, that help keep port channels and rivers navigable, as well as shorelines protected from erosion, dredges are key components of the nation’s maritime infrastructure. The Army Corps of Engineers, which funds much of the U.S. dredging industry, spent about $1.3 billion on it in the last fiscal year.
Illinois-based Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corp. is the largest dredging business in the country, with 28 dredges, its most recent annual report says.
Recently, three of them – including the Liberty Island, one of the largest dredges of its type in the country – have been at work here in Hampton Roads as part of a $34.5 million replenishment of a roughly seven-mile stretch of beach in the Willoughby Spit-Ocean View area.
“This is not muck,” said James Hoffman, the captain of the dredge Liberty Island, about the stuff he and his crew have been vacuuming from the bottom of the harbor approach, near the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, recently.
It is sand, thank you very much, and pretty darn good sand, too.
The Liberty Island has to sample the sand from the borrow area, getting the Corps’ approval first before taking on a load, to ensure that the sand will match that already on the beach.
Hoffman’s dredge, along with the other two – the Padre Island and the Dodge Island, both of which began the project in late February and are now off the job – have been busy removing and pumping roughly 1.4 million tons of sand from about 65 feet down, the floor of an auxiliary channel next to Thimble Shoal Channel, one of the port’s main shipping alleys.
When the job is done, nearly 1.7 million tons of sand will have been moved from the harbor entrance to the beach.
All three vessels are “trailing suction hopper dredges” – Rube Goldberg-like ships that function like floating vacuum cleaners, dropping two drag arms that extend to a channel floor or river bottom, where they, well, suck.
In this case, however, they don’t suck muck: “They wouldn’t allow that,” Hoffman said of the Corps’ sand sniffers.
Once given the green light, the Liberty Island needs only a little more than an hour to vacuum about 7,000 tons of fine-silt sand into its hold or “hopper,” and roughly the same time to get to the end of a nearly two-mile-long, 30-inch-wide pipeline of sorts, submerged just off Fort Wool, the 19th-century coastal fortification that sits just off the south entrance to the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel.
Once the pipe end is hoisted and connected to the front of the dredge, it takes another hour-plus or so to pump all of the sand out of the hopper, from which it moves through the underwater pipeline to the beach.
After disengaging from the pipe, it’s back to the borrow area, another hour-plus trip, where the process is repeated. As of late last month, the Liberty Island was making about four round trips a day.
Sound kind of boring?
Not to Nathan Eldridge, a Liberty Island drag tender, whose seat faces backward on the vessel, overlooking the ship’s cavernous, churning hopper.
Six computer-screen monitors – three on each side – stream data to him about how quickly and densely sand is moving through the various phases of the operation.
“It’s kind of like a big video game,” he said. “You try to dig and pump your loads as fast as possible.”
He says there’s some competition among the “drag teams,” though everybody’s wary of pushing things too fast: “If you plug the line, the game’s over.”
Eldridge is among the roughly 18 crew members on the vessel at any given time, who generally work in six-hour shifts, six hours on, six off.
Nobody gets eight hours of sleep; it’s more like five, if you’re lucky.
Vacations, however, are never far off: Crew members generally work four weeks, followed by two weeks off.
Great Lakes, where he’s been employed for 28 years, provides airfare home, which in Eldridge’ case is Moss Point, Miss., and then back again.
“You get used to it after awhile,” he said of the schedule. “My wife’s been with me for 20 years, so …”
Rick McClenton, from Jacksonville, Fla., who helps steer the dredge, has been with Great Lakes for 28 years. Married with three kids and three grandkids, he says his family has adapted to his schedule.
The best part about it, he added: “When you’re off, you’re off.”
Once its work in Ocean View wraps up, sometime this month, the Liberty Island will mosey down the coast to do the same kind of beach-repair work off the Outer Banks, Hoffman said, adding that plans can always change at the last minute.
Great Lakes’ 2016 annual report states that the U.S. dredging market is made up of four main types of work:
– Capital: mostly big port-expansion projects like those that have been under way at ports on the U.S. East Coast;
– Coastal protection: moving sand from the ocean floor to shoreline locations, much like the Ocean View project;
– Maintenance: largely involves “re-dredging” of previously deepened waterways and harbor channels, to ensure they’re at designated depths;
– Rivers and lakes: focused on domestic lakes and rivers, like the Mississippi, including inland levee and construction dredging, as well as environmental restoration.
Most of Great Lakes’ dredging revenues last year were split between capital dredging and coastal protection projects.
Hoffman estimates that about 85 percent of the Liberty Island’s work is beach replenishment, which has soared in the last decade due to an increase in storm and hurricane damage.
For Karen Lange, one of the dredge’s cooks, traveling to different parts of the country is one of the bonuses the job offers, in addition to great pay and benefits.
She first took to the water working on tow boats on the Mississippi River, before eventually making her way to the galleys on dredges.
On a recent Friday, her lunch options included fried shrimp, baked chicken breast parmesan, corned beef and cabbage and sloppy joe’s on a bun, along with an array of vegetable and salad options, and fresh berries and chocolate silk pie.
Home is Pensacola, Fla., but the accommodations on the dredge aren’t bad.
They include new memory-foam beds, cable TV and wireless access, among other amenities, she said: “I’m not a 9-to-5-er, so this job was appealing to me.”
Source: The Virginian-Pilot
