Weekly News Summary For July 3-9, 2006:
Proposal Would Sink Ships To Block MR-GO
Sinking obsolete National Defense Reserve Fleet ships, both in the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet (MR-GO) and in selective spots along the Louisiana coastline, may seem like an extreme approach to hurricane protection.
But the idea is being presented by Louisiana State Sen. Walter J. Boasso (R-Chalmette) as a quick and less expensive measure to provide immediate protection for the state coastline, which has been losing its battle with the Gulf of Mexico for years.
Boasso explained his proposal at a meeting of the League of Woman Voters St. Tammany (situated north of Lake Pontchartrain) last week.
Boasso, a resident of Arabi, downstream from New Orleans, said 100,000 homes out of 122,000 in his district were total losses due to flooding from Hurricane Katrina as storm surge waters caused levees to fail.
The meeting featured three other speakers who urged the need for coastal restoration to protect coastal Louisiana from future hurricanes.
An operator of an intermodal trucking company, Boasso was the author of legislation to create the Louisiana Governor’s Maritime Advisory Task Force, which met for the first time just before Hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck….
Although more commonplace in the past, family-run companies are still fairly evident in today’s barge and towing industry. However, a company with five family members is—and was even years ago—a rarity. This was brought to light recently when Magnolia Marine Transport Company dedicated its new towboat June 23 in Vicksburg, Miss.
The Vicksburg-based firm named the new boat Mr. Lampton after the four Lampton brothers who are involved in the business. The fifth family member is their father, the still-active, 80-year-old founder and chairman of Magnolia Marine and its parent company, Ergon Inc.
The 3,000 hp. towboat was built by Nichols Propeller Company, Greenville, Miss.
Magnolia Marine is the river transportation arm of Ergon, which Les Lampton Jr. began in 1954 with one other employee to provide bulk lube oil to drilling operations in southern and central Mississippi. He started Magnolia Marine three years later with the leased vessel Jack T and three barges. The fledgling company transported No. 6 oil to power and paper plants, working out of the garage apartment of then-general manager Mark Shurden in Greenville….
Cleanup and recovery efforts following the June 20 oil spill at the CITGO Clifton Ridge Terminal in the Calcasieu Ship Channel near Lake Charles, La., are ongoing while a safety zone stretches from light 116, north of the Interstate 210 bridge, to light 92.
The Coast Guard moved the southern boundary of the safety zone north to light 92, which is just south of the Intracoastal Waterway. In turn, that opened Calcasieu Lake for recreational and commercial traffic. A temporary Vessel Traffic Service, staffed by Coast Guard personnel and industry personnel, is coordinating commercial vessel traffic transiting the waterway.
Oil recovery efforts began on June 21 following a heavy rainfall and partial flooding at the CITGO facility, which overwhelmed the facility’s wastewater storage tank area and dikes. A mixture of storm water and oil was released into the Indian Marais, CITGO’s on-site drainage feature.
An estimated 11,000 barrels of oil were removed from the river, and another 18,000 barrels were removed from the Indian Marais, as of June 28, which brings the total to 29,000 barrels removed to date….
Two projects remain under construction as part of the Army Corps of Engineers efforts to return the hurricane protection system in New Orleans and surrounding areas damaged by Hurricane Katrina to their state before the disaster.
The 17th Street Canal and London Avenue Canal projects are moving along, said Dan Hitchings, director of Task Force Hope. He said the gates at 17th Street Canal are still not fully operable and would estimate that they would be complete no later than mid-July. On the London Avenue Canal, he said the construction should be complete a week or so sooner.
In the meantime, the temporary measures remain in place that requires sheet piling and temporary pumps. Foundation problems existed at London that led to the delays. Hitchings said the workers had to actually pull sheet pile out and start over. At 17th Street, Hitchings said the congested work site forced workers to only work on certain projects at certain times. Similar ground conditions existed at 17th Street, where crews often found stumps underground and had to dig them up before proceeding….
Although it has been in existence for five years, this year’s Paducah area “Adopt A Towboat” exercise was the best yet, according to E. J. Abell, director of education at the River Heritage Museum. The museum coordinated the interactive program in which elementary classroom students are paired for the school year with towboats and crews operating along the inland waterways.
Abell said 11 schools in the McCracken and Livingston County school systems participated this year and at least two more teachers in Livingston County have indicated an interest in getting their classes involved next year. She also hopes to add towing firms from Illinois and Missouri to the ranks of sponsors from the Paducah area.
The program is important because “it allows us to get the word out (to the general public) about how important the towboat industry is to our local economy,” Abell said during a May 24 awards ceremony at the Maiden’s Alley Cinema, adjacent to the River Heritage Museum. “We live here in the four rivers region with rivers all around us, and we watch towboats going up and down. Our students deserve to know what’s going on out on the river.”
Abell said the museum assigns a captain and towboat to each participating class at the beginning of the school year. Throughout the year, students and their respective crews exchange letters and e-mails, Christmas cards and occasional phone calls as they utilize a computer and charts to maintain a log of the vessel’s position along the inland waterways. The boats’ captains also visited the classrooms and arranged tours of their towboats….
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