Posted on September 28, 2020
CATOOSA — The Tulsa-Rogers County Port Authority on Thursday authorized spending another $1 million for dredging the entrance to the Tulsa Port of Catoosa’s channel that was affected by 2019 flooding.
The money will be used to remove an additional 140,000 cubic yards of sediment to restore the port’s channel to the original depth of 12 feet.
“It’s the material that was moved by the Verdigris River and Bird Creek,” said Daniel Grisham, deputy port director. “We have no current that flows through our channel. It’s a slack harbor. The water, the build-up, the material that’s in the water is allowed to migrate into our channel. With no current, it just settles out builds up upon itself.”
Following an emergency action by the authority in May, it hired contractors to remove 40,000 cubic yards of sediment at a cost of $550,000. But before the dredging started, a survey discovered that the majority of the port’s navigational channel had new sediment deposits of 1 to 4 feet throughout, making some docks inaccessible at that depth.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers performed the initial survey and weren’t authorized to come through the entire channel, Grisham said.
The port, newly branded Tulsa Ports on Thursday, last was dredged to 12 feet in 2017, and before that, it was 2005, Port Director David Yarbrough said.
“Not counting the 2019 floods, we had several years of higher waters, higher rainfall events,” he said. “So this is new territory for us. I think in the history of the port (1971), we’ve only dredged the channel maybe four times prior to this. That’s why this is so unexpected. We really thought, `hey, we’re good because we just dredged two years ago.’”
