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Sun rays peeking through passing clouds over Lansing, Iowa, reflected off the pale yellow paint of a boat that signifies a fresh start and the end of an era. It towered over the Peck, and as the two were tied together, they appeared as a car being parked next to a home.
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The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers new Quarters Boat Harold E. Taggatz and Towboat General Warren remain on the Mississippi River at Lansing, Iowa Wednesday. The vessels, along with the Dredge Goetz, make up the St. Paul District's new dredging fleet.
(Photo by Melissa Carlo/Winona Daily News) |
Chris Lennon stepped off the Peck and onto the Harold E. Taggatz. A line of pipe floated on a string of pontoons about a half-mile up the Mississippi River, running from a mound of sand onshore at the Wisconsin side of the Blackhawk Bridge to its river-bottom source. Lennon walked along the Taggatz’ deck and into the administrative office of the new quarters boat, his lifejacket bearing his unofficial title of “Inspector Gadget.”
Inside the office, a mound of boxes and papers sat unpacked. The crew apologized for the mess.
“We just hurried up and moved in,” dredge inspector Lennon said.
For the moment, the crew was idle, though not listless. The first mission with the Taggatz was stalled, and the team of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was waiting to start up again, separating the river of water from the river of sand.
Daily and seasonal delays for dredge crews are not uncommon. About three times a day, work must stop for passing barges and towboats.
This year’s work was delayed for weeks as high water slowed shipping along the river.
Par for the course when you work on a floating collective of drill-bits, pipes, beds and power stations.
“There’s not a thing about dredging that isn’t affected by Mother Nature,” Lennon said.
This delay in pumping tons of slurry from the river to shore on Wednesday wasn’t for the clouds overhead or the water underneath, but to wait for the placement site — what the crew calls the mounds of dredged material — and for supplies to be collected from town.
The U.S. Army Corps’ St. Paul District dredging fleet, based in Fountain City, Wis., is a self-sufficient operation. For decades, the crews lived and worked entirely on the Dredge William A. Thompson. The mostly local residents, from places such as Rushford and St. Charles, Minn., Cochrane and Pepin, Wis., spend up to a week at a time on the river, splitting shifts so dredging can happen 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Now, with the retirement of the Thompson, operations are divided across three new boats.
The Taggatz houses the crew of about 60 — split into teams of 15 that alternate shifts and days. The Dredge William L. Goetz, armed with a cutterhead to stir up the sediment, is transported by the towboat General Warren.
Goetz. Taggatz. Warren. Thompson. Once, they were the names of men who served dutifully for the corps. Now, they are printed on the sides of ships. The crews who follow in the footsteps of those men carry on the tradition of clearing a great river so it can safely stay a corridor of commerce. The ships’ namesakes are gone, and the Dredge Thompson retired, but the work continues.
Clearing a path
The Goetz’ 225-foot long, 39-foot wide form sat along an island, its discharge pipe trailing for thousands of feet behind it. At the front of the boat is its menacing cutterhead, what looks like a massive eggbeater armed with teeth to cut into the sediment. The cutterhead spins and digs into the sand, then suctions up the mixture into its pipes.
The corps uses the dredge to maintain a nine-foot safe channel for ships. To keep that channel, trouble spots are mapped using Global Positioning System technology, and dredging work is planned. Once the ice breaks up after the winter, those spots are cleared, typically by digging out channels of about a dozen or more feet deep.
When dredging, the Goetz swings from side to side in an advancing arc, as two anchors pulled by cables lift up and down. Walking on stilts along the riverbed is how the corps describes it.
Precision is key to dredging. A mixture of 35 percent sediment, 65 percent water is ideal. Dig too shallow and a safe channel won’t be made. Dig too deep or too wide and too much sediment will get pumped to shore, possibly exceeding carefully secured permits the Corps needs to place the material on land.
But at around 2 o’clock on Wednesday, the dredge sat still. No slurry pumped to shore. Most of the crew was on board the Taggatz, though some were on their way to and from town, picking up groceries and supplies.
In the Taggatz’ galley, cook Loni Moen and assistant Connie Brantner prepared lunch. The room looks no different than a land-based kitchen, save for the river seen through the windows. The mess hall is next door, ready to be filled with the meals and those eager to eat them.
“They never go hungry here,” Moen said. “Cooking here is just like at a restaurant.”
Moen tries to keep the meals varied for her crewmates: burgers, steak, shrimp and an occasional chicken concoction that ends up looking like what Lennon referred to as a muffin made with meat.
During the dredging season — typically May through around Thanksgiving — crews move from stop to stop along the St. Paul, Rock Island and St. Louis Army Corps districts. When the fleet gets to a placement site, it takes between 12 and 24 hours to set up their operations.
At this point in the season, they are working seven consecutive days on the boat straight, with seven days off. Shifts can run long as they work out the kinks of a new fleet and play catch up to a season delayed by weather.
It’s hard work, the kind that begs for chemistry between people. On this fleet, it helps that many have worked for the dredging operation for decades. Moen worked 12 years on the Thompson. Lennon’s got 22 years under his belt. Chief Officer Steve Engler and dredge operator Scott Ressie each have over 20 years working on the river.
“The crew I work with now has been outstanding,” Lennon said. “Living on a boat like this, you tend to form a bond.”
That chemistry can be seen in the work and the down time. As Lennon poured himself a cup of coffee, he burst out in a boisterous operatic verse. Moen laughed and shook her head.
“He’s crazy, but we love him,” she said.
These days, it’s a little easier to spend a week straight with the same crew, crazy or lovable, because of the upgrade in living spaces. The Taggatz is brand new, and though its quarters — with its bunk beds and metal lockers — aren’t much, its predecessor was no four star hotel, either.
But that’s not to say the old boat won’t be missed.
The old boat
The Dredge Thompson had a good run.
It lived long past its expected 50 years, working as a self-sustained dredging operation from 1937 until 2005, when the Goetz took over the heavy duty work. It was named after William A. Thompson, who worked for the Corps of Engineers from 1878 to 1925.
The ship housed crews, was self-propelled, and at over 1,200 tons is a site to behold. In many ways, it was the last of a dying breed.
“It was a grand old boat,” Lennon said.
Any piece of machinery as large and as old as the Thompson has its own character, traits known best by those that inhabit it. On the old dredge, the large quantities of wood increased the ever-present river problem of spiders. When the ship headed south, brown recluse bites were a real concern.
Residents from the Winona area could use the departure and return of the Thompson as a mark of the season, and for a lifetime, the Thompson traversed the river. After seven decades of dredging up and down the Mississippi, it was time to put her to rest.
The final straw was the arrival of the Taggatz, which took over serving as the crew’s living quarters this year, a position the Thompson has served since the Goetz began work. Now, the Thompson’s days will be stationary, as it perches on a concrete platform at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum in Winona.
Or so is the hope of the museum.
Larry Gorrell, executive director of the museum, said keeping the Thompson in the region after retirement is how it should be.
“It’s always been a part of the community,” Gorrell said.
But there’s no exact timeframe for the Thompson to arrive at the museum, and on Friday, the museum’s board raised doubts about its ability to raise enough funds or meet all the requirements needed to obtain the boat.
But hope isn’t lost, just on hold. The Thompson has to go through a lengthy decommissioning process, and the paperwork is already under way. The corps is working to get the ship to Winona sometime this year, Shannon Bauer, a corps spokeswoman, said.
“We want to see it go to the museum, too,” Bauer said.
The crew that knew her spoke of their old summer work-home with a fondness and familiarity that only they and their predecessors can. It’s the small things they’ll miss, like the multitude of shelve space the Thompson had in the kitchen. Cabinets on the new boat make up for the lack of shelves said Moen, who worked on the Thompson for over a decade.
“It’s a bittersweet deal,” she said. “She’s had her day, now its time to say goodbye.”
In with the new
Remnants of the Thompson lurk around corners in the new fleet. Old wooden workbenches taken from the boat sit juxtaposed with the high-tech dredge controls on the Goetz. Other pieces are tucked away in the new living quarters.
“I brought my pillow with me from the Thompson,” Moen said with a sly smile.
Some things have stayed the same, but many more have changed. The Thompson’s dredging equipment was hydraulically powered; the Goetz uses virtually no hydraulic equipment at all, to limit oil seeping into the river.
“Dredging has changed a lot the last 20 years,” Engler said.
Concern for the environment has pushed many of those changes. Along with efforts to avoid the release of oil, how and where the dredged sediment is placed is more highly scrutinized. Instead of dumping it straight onto the shore, sites are selected and approved by various environmental agencies. The permits the corps secures specify exactly how much and where the Mississippi’s bottom can be dropped, to try to avoid ruining critical habitats.
“You have to look at the whole river system and see it preserved,” Lennon said. “To do that, you’ve got to do extra work.”
Monitoring those dredging issues is part of Lennon’s job. Technically, he doesn’t work for the dredge, but for the corps’ channels and harbors division.
The dredge’s pump is powered by a variable-speed pump, two 1,900 horse power motors that can work together or separately, giving the Goetz more flexibility and more power. Downtime for repairs is greatly decreased on the Goetz compared with its predecessor.
Despite the improvements, glitches still occur, including the kinks that come with new technology and new equipment. Late in the afternoon, when the Goetz kicked into gear and started pumping, it did so with the help of an assistant boat. A failed hauling winch meant the boat had to push the Goetz in one direction as it performed its dredging arc.
As he stopped and pivoted at his starboard turn, Ressie frowned. A cable pulling the dredge wasn’t taut, a symptom that could lead to larger problems if the cable coiled wrong.
“You get a flat spot in the line and it could snap,” he said.
As darker clouds rolled in from Minnesota border, the dredging stopped again so Ressie could check the cutterhead.
Work would continue, but this was yet another delay.
Any crew will have turnover, and some of the workers dredging on Wednesday were on their first tour of duty. But many, like Lennon, Moen, Ressie and Engler, have years of experience and the knowledge of the tricks of the trade. The ability to tell where you are by the stars, the old river depth calls that inspired the name Mark Twain — those are remnants of the days of the Thompson that the crew carries on.
Lennon has close to thirty years of government service, split between time as a Marine in Vietnam, as a police officer, two tours in Iraq building infrastructure and his time dredging. When the St. Paul district offered Lennon the job years ago, his wife answered the phone and accepted the job for him.
“I was at a point in my life where I wanted to take a chance,” he said.
In a few years, Lennon will have the chance to retire, but he said he’s not ready yet. When he is, he’ll train an apprentice and pass on those tricks of the trade.
Goetz. Taggatz. Peck. Those names belonged to faces once. Lennon worked with or met all three. They give those names to boats after the faces are gone to honor their hard work and service. A nice gesture, but one the old guard from the Thompson would rather leave to others for now.
Nolan Rosenkrans can be reached at 507-453-3519 or by e-mail at nolan.rosenkrans@lee.net.
