Life on the lock

[ExiledInIllinois]

I shot some video this evening of the US Coast Guard.  We had the lower lock gates open and a tow with tankers was coming northbound.  The USCG had to get through in a hurry.  No emergency, but a practice emergency run through w/traffic... We have about 3' of difference, so they had to jump the wave when we flashed them through.  They had no problem, the video doesn't show it too well.

 

Here it is.  You can see the lower gates open and the tow in the background while we sneaked the Zodiac through in a hurry.  Right after they squirmed through, we have to close the upper gates so the water rushing through doesn't break up the tow and cause problems.

 

 

 

Edited August 10, 2014 by ExiledInIllinois

[ExiledInIllinois]

Here are some videos of a bunch of bassboats, a couple jet skis, and other recreational craft locking through with a towboat pushing 6 loaded barges, about 9,600 tons of cargo:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited August 11, 2014 by ExiledInIllinois

[ExiledInIllinois]

This is what it looks like when they use modern GPS and depth sounding equipment to sound a river.

 

The Survey vessel, USACE M/V Holling:

 

 

Videos: WARNING, NSFW since you may fall asleep! It is like watching paint dry!

 

Sounding the lock chamber:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf6AJuHmxfg

 

I wish we had this tech 25 years ago when I broke in with hydrographic survey! We would have to build baseline (which could mean bushwacking through poison ivy) and then sound off of that @ every designated station (usually every 100'). The boat would be a rowboat with 3 people on it. The boat would have a tagline or a giant spooled tape measure (steel cable) with cloth marks every 20 feet woven into the cable. The boat would have to come off the baseline @ the given angle by a crew member onshore using a sextant. One crew member on the boat would take a depth reading with a lead line (weight attached to a marked sash chain). The "dipper" would call out the reading to the person recording it into the fieldbook (usually the crew chief)... The third person in the boat would be operating the boat. Total crew of about 4-5 guys... A crew could get down to 3 guys only on the boat if they used range poles on shore and the recorder had a brake to stop the tagline from reeling out... This brake would stop the boat @ the given depth spot while the operator put it on the right angle from shore using the range poles.

 

Now... As seen in the videos, it is like mowing the lawn!!... Sweep and go! Just two crew members in a boat with A/C. In the old days, big harbors like BFLO and CHI would require 5+ full time crews to be working from spring to fall... Building baseline, marking stations, and taking soundings. Sometimes when the taglines were too short or the area too big, intersecting taglines would be needed. When vessels needed to transit, the taglines could be dropped to the bottom of the water and the vessel could go over it.

 

All this is done to determine how much material to dredge under laws like the Rivers & Harbor Acts... Harbors of Refuge Act... Etc... Etc... These laws dating back to the 1800's.

 

Sounding the upper pool:

 

Edited September 5, 2014 by ExiledInIllinois

[ExiledInIllinois]

Maybe we can get a bunch of these in BFLO as "floating hotel rooms" so BFLO can meet the room requirement and host a SuperBowl?

 

If anybody is interested. This vessel is making its way through The Lakes.

 

MS Hamburg:

 

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Hamburg

 

It can be tracked @ www.MarineTraffic.com

 

German cruise ship... approx. 470' Long x 70' Wide (Beam)... Gotta leave the same way it came, through the Welland and St. Lawrence. Length and width not a problem for The Inlands, but height and draft (16' deep) is the problem. It is on its leg between Milwaukee and Chicago, USCG has posted a "security zone" for that portion of its journey.

 

 

Edit: Too lazy to drive downtown after work, from Google Images, hope it is the rignt one ;-)

 

Edited October 2, 2014 by ExiledInIllinois

[ExiledInIllinois]

Hey guys... Long time no visit to this thread... Finally have a little time on Thanksgiving to post some pics of the dewatering to the lower sector gates. Happy Thanksgiving from the lock & dam!

 

Here is a good shot of the bulkheads (cofferdam):

 

 

What's happening is the lock's sector gates are being rehabed. This is the first time since 1979 and only the second time since initial construction in 1960. The upper gate pins and the lower pintle are being serviced. The gates will also be sandblasted and painted. This means the 200 ton gate (each) has to be jacked up.

 

Dewater started on 11/3 and will go to 12/19. On 12/19 @ 17:30 we will open back up for traffic. At that time (12/19) we will pass traffic to 1/19/15 @ 07:00. By 1/19/15 everything will have been moved to the upper sector gates and we will start the whole process again with the upper end set of sector gates. The second closure will go to March 6, 2015.

 

More pics to follow:

 

New pin & pintle set:

 

 

Old pin & pintle set:

 

 

This is a view of the gates during normal ops (July 2014):

 

 

Jacked up lower sector gate #3:

 

 

The hinges are to the left. Notice the upper hinge gets pins and the lower hinge gets a pintle ball for the 200 ton gate to swing on:

 

 

Close up of upper hinge:

 

 

Close up of pintle assembly, this is the ball the gate turns on:

 

 

Old pintle bushing. Notice the grease, that's the grease we pump in daily through the zerk fittings from ontop of the walkway:

 

 

Another shot of an old bushing. Notice the grease line in. When the gate moves, the grease is applied around. These were bad and the gate was "tipping" and binding:

 

 

Just like the hinges on your bathroom door... Aye?

 

Just a little WD-40 and the squeek goes away!

 

 

 

Keeping me busy... Happy Thanksgiving!

 

Oh... Notice the zebra mussels. They are 3 feet thick on the bottom and all over the metal.

 

These giant rivets or "buttons" are sacrifical anodes for the old cathodic protection system:

 

 

If you look in the other pics, you will see the mussels on metal that is normally below water... Looks like texture.

[Keukasmallies]

Thanks for the great pics! Interesting stuff.

[ExiledInIllinois]

This from today. The picture below shows how many zebra mussels there are while trying to put things into perspective. I was standing about 20 feet below the top of the lockwall on the bottom of the river in the sector gate #3 (lower I-wall) recess when I took this shot.

 

I titled this one:

 

~Zebra Mussels on Concrete, Go Bills

 

 

Notice the floor of the river, those are all zebra mussels too.

 

I do say... I have quite the artistic touch!

[ExiledInIllinois]

Hey... If anybody is interested in seeing how a modern lock and dam is flooded after a dewatering. Just got word that the waterborne commodities are flowing again in in S.Chicago. Barges are lined up and heading through now. Just passed the first 16,000 tons in the last few hours. Lower end gates are all rehabbed, blasted, painted with new timbers, etc... We will pass traffic for the next 30 days 24/7 keeping the economy rolling, industry is itching to get through and will be happy to get their products efficiently to market. Maybe they will get them all out of the way before Tuesday morning (next time I work). ;-)

 

This is what it looked like earlier in the day when we started to to pull the bulkheads and flood the pit around the lower sector gate bays:

 

 

Got some pictures of the dewatered finished gates... Hope to have video (and get approval). But need to compress them on a computer. Way too big for this site from my phone. The above picture was sent to me, so it is already compressed.

[ExiledInIllinois]

I have a little time, chores are all done and in between tasks. I still post here and there when I get time. Right now we are ripping up the 3 and 2 inch bubbler pipe... Cutting and rethreading new replacement pipe, installing that on the bottom of the river. Here is another write up about the project and the aging infrastructure:

 

http://www.mvr.usace.army.mil/Media/Publications/TowerTimes.aspx

 

You can open up the .pdf and then save it if you like. This is from our District newsletter, the Tower Times.

 

Right now I am working from noon-midnight each day. The winter weather can make it difficult... But we are powering through and the morale of the workers is so-so. It can be back breaking work @ times, factor in the brutal weather, the ice, mud... So much mud! March 8th can't come too soon!

 

Three seasons it seems like: Winter, Summer, and Mud Season. We are totally in the throws of winter mixed with mud! Summer seems like a decade away!

Edited January 29, 2015 by ExiledInIllinois

[ExiledInIllinois]

Hey... Gotta a little break early in the evening... These pictures were shot yesterday.

 

Here is a pretty cool sight... Bald eagles have return to the City of Chicago! Amazing that they are here now in South Chicago right along w/heavy industry. Somewhere Rachel Carson is smiling!

 

These aren't very good pics, just ones grabbed w/a phone... But you can clearly see them. These pics were taken right below the dam on the Calumet River, South Chicago. This is crazy, only 40 years ago, nothing lived in this water except sludge worms! There is a nesting pair with young. They fish below the dam where there is open water... Sometimes going after the divinig ducks like mergansers... The ducks usually win by diving away. Or maybe the eagles are going after the same fish?

 

Pics of the eagles are hard to grab, never sure when they are soaring in the area.

 

 

In flight, left part of picture:

 

 

 

Perched:

 

 

 

Edited February 27, 2015 by ExiledInIllinois

[ExiledInIllinois]

http://corpslocks.usace.army.mil/lpwb/f?p=121:3:0::NO:::

 

Lock reopened for business on Friday @ 13:30... Finally some nice weather... First recreational boats came through yesterday...

 

Hurray! No more "pit of despair!"

[mead107]

Locks on the Mohawk still iced in

[ExiledInIllinois]

Locks on the Mohawk still iced in

That is interesting mead. Probably no commercial boats to bust it up. The first boat through here after the re-opening was a southern boat that stayed above us during our second dewatering project. He's pretty big and has about 3,000 horsepower. He was pushing 2 loaded petrol barges with about 6,000 tons... They got stuck a couple times in the ice and had to make 3 runs towards the lock. He finally cut a trail. Once that happens, the ice on the river will flow and melt a lot faster.

 

Anyway, I was keeping an eye on the sat images of the Great Lakes... The Lake Ontario images show a pretty clear picture of the Finger Lakes. Seneca and Cayuga Lake look like they don't freeze, all the other Finger Lakes were frozen over. Is there a reason for that? The surface area isn't that big, is it because they are really deep and produce warm water from below?

Edited March 18, 2015 by ExiledInIllinois

[mead107]

Something about deep water. 600 ft. And it works. Turns over. Read it some place. They won't open the Mohawk till al the ice is out. Gates hung from bridges

[ExiledInIllinois]

 

I have some footage of a USCG Zodiac taking the small 3 foot head @ the lower end. There was a 700' tow in the chamber tied of (4 part lines) @ the time... Not too much water to take going downbound. Upbound and the chamber is more resitricted and the boat cavitates a little.

 

From Saturday, 4/18. They were answering an emergency call in the canal/lower pool.

[ExiledInIllinois]

I figure I would update this thread. Just visted The Okeechobee Waterway & the 5 USACE locks there.

 

Here are few pictures of a sector-gated controlling structure @ St. Luice, FLA.

 

Locks down there do run 365 7 days a week, not 24 hours like up here on the big commercial waterways, but from only 07:00 to 17:00 daily. Very little commercial tonnage, just mainly pleasure craft, hence being less industrial (and HazMat volatile they do allow the general public to cross the structure). Lock chambers much smaller than lock chambers up here and @ the Panamax dimension lock I am at. St. Lucie is about 1/8th the size @ 250'x 50'... But they operate exactly like us as a controlling structure.

 

Visualize the Okeechobee system to be like the Great Lakes basin in micro. Most of SFla drains into Okeechobee and then to the sea, Gulf @ F.Meyers & Atlantic @ Port St.Lucie/Stuart...

 

If I get sick of chipping ice and the cold... Working the graveyard shift... Who knows, a job down there may be nice! BUT summers may be the deal breaker! But nice retirement gig!!!!

 

 

Pics to follow... Again, the same as up here but much smaller scale.

 

Oops... I may have to wait to get to a PC and compress the pics under the 200kb site limit... So I can attach them.

Edited February 28, 2016 by ExiledInIllinois

[Marv's Neighbor]

We took a 7 day Rhine River cruise in December. Started in Basel Switzerland, and ended in Amsterdam. I lost count of the locks, but there must have been 15-20. All Barge traffic on the Rhine, very beautiful!

[ExiledInIllinois]

We took a 7 day Rhine River cruise in December. Started in Basel Switzerland, and ended in Amsterdam. I lost count of the locks, but there must have been 15-20. All Barge traffic on the Rhine, very beautiful!

That is so cool! My son was there last year and rolled his eyes @ me when I asked about the locks on The Rhine. Meh! Son of a lock op! :-(

 

A canal boat holiday in England would be cool... Many old structures built during canal craze in the 19th & 18th centuries... They still have working hardware and windlasses that are centuries old! If that interests you... I can post more links.

 

A quote by Charles Dickens about the Sonning Lock (England, on the River Thames):

 

"The floral tastes of the lock-keeper generally make Sonning Lock very bright and gay."

 

"Is there a spot more lovely than the rest, By art improved, by nature truly blessed? A noble river at its base running, It is a little village known as Sonning." -James Sadler, Sonning lock-keeper (1845-1885)

 

A little close to home would be Ottawa and through the Trent-Severn in Ontario... Some of those structures were built before Portland cement was invented... Built with all cut stone (Brit Sappers & Miners) and still holding up well. Lot of hand operated too, just like in England.

Edited February 29, 2016 by ExiledInIllinois

[ExiledInIllinois]

If anybody is interested, I compressed the photos of St. Lucie Lock in Fla and some recent pics of what a large commercial/industrial lock looks like up north. Both locks are sector gated "controlling works." Sector gates can be opened against the pressure of the water difference (head) and don't need filling or emptying valves, the chamber can be filled or emptied through the center of the open gates:

 

St. Lucie (250' x 50' lock chamber):

 

 

 

 

 

Chicago, Illinois (1000' x 110', low lift/shallow draft Panamax):

 

 

 

St. Lucie, Fla:

 

 

 

This wouldn't fit through the lock down in Florida or through the Okeechobee Waterway:

 

 

 

 

The barge w/the vessel pushing it:

 

 

 

 

 

Sorry to bore... But there have been some here that expressed interest in what the Corps of Engineers manages on The Nation's Waterways...

Edited March 1, 2016 by ExiledInIllinois

[Beerball]

A canal boat holiday in England would be cool.

Tells you where my mind is...I read that as "A carnal boat holiday..."