Posted on February 4, 2019
In December the Port of New Bedford announced that it had been awarded a $15.4 million Department of Transportation grant to improve the harbor. Great news. A ton of money. So this week I squeezed myself into the tiny office occupied by Port Director Ed Anthes-Washburn in the aerie atop the Wharfinger Building on Pier 3 to learn a little about how the project may take shape. It’s worth remembering that the venerable Wharfinger Building was itself a project back in the day when it was constructed using bricks from the demolished Bristol Mill after the city’s textile jobs went south. It opened for business as the fish auction in 1941.
Anyway, Ed duly displayed some brightly colored maps of the harbor depths for my benefit. They were sophisticated enough to show the bucket scrapes left on the seabed from earlier dredging as well as a sunken boat north of Coggeshall Street. “The top two feet of the harbor bottom is contaminated,” he told me. The bad stuff has to go somewhere and the preferred alternative is to bury it in a CAD cell- an acronym for ‘confined aquatic disposal.’ That’s a deep hole, in other words. PCB’s are buried in these cells under clean fill. This allows the PCB-free material below the top two feet to be dredged up and placed ashore.
The new plan presents an exciting prospect. It will expand the harbor shoreline significantly by filling in the shallow waterfront area that runs roughly from just above Eastern Fisheries to the Seatrade building, below the old Revere Copper site. The existing 21-acre parcel, located off Herman Melville Boulevard and known as the North Terminal, is owned by the city. If you look at a satellite map of this area you can see very clearly how much terra firma this project will add to the working waterfront by reclaiming approximately six acres of land for marine-industrial use.
The Port has already obtained a grant from the commonwealth for the steel required to construct 800 feet of new bulkhead fronting this area and the clean sediment removed from the harbor will be used as backfill behind it. This will deliver some desperately needed dock space for boats to tie up while, at the same time, the dredging will improve navigable water depth.
The existing businesses in that area such as New Bedford Welding Supply and Marine Hydraulics are lessees, Ed said, and will have first right of refusal for the expanded area once the project is completed. Ed predicts there will be plenty of interest. “This project will activate a whole area that is not currently using the water,” he said. “Once we get that project done there will just be two harbor areas remaining that we need to concentrate on, the Revere Copper site and the Sprague/Eversource site. After that the entire waterfront will be working and that will be a pivotal moment.”
Dredging is the key to all future development, he said. With only six feet of water currently available to boats at the Revere Copper site it has remained undeveloped. “We also want to activate the north side of Pope’s Island where Fairhaven Shipyard just bought the hardware store,” he said. There are plenty of other waterfront business owners eager to get involved too and even a price tag of $20 million for dredging has not deterred them, he said. The price is so high because of the PCB contamination. “But the private sector is going to do a 20 percent match for the construction of the CAD cell and for their individual berths,” he said. “It’s a great example of a public-private partnership. It’s a significant investment for them but they know they will get a return.”
That is largely because New Bedford is the only place on the East Coast that is growing as a fishing port, according to Ed. “And we’re growing quickly. We need additional docking and services and there are a lot of things that can happen if we can tee it up.” Ed’s task currently is to juggle two parallel but complementary projects — the new bulkhead and the clean fill — that have different funding sources. To keep both on track and to help out with the engineering side of things the Port Authority’ brought in Ceasar Duarte Jr. “He’s got a background in marine construction so he’s helping us with the timeline.” And to keep an eye on the money George Krikorian has come onboard as Director of Finance, he said. So a team is in place, the project is funded and the timeline is set. This is all good news for the future of the port, the city and the region and the excellent work of the Port Authority in making things happen should not be overlooked.
Source: SouthCoast Today
