Weekly News Summary For November 23-29, 2009:
State and federal officials confirmed on November 13 what The Waterways Journal reported as a possibility last week: Barrier IIA of the series of electric fish barriers keeping Asian carp out of the Great Lakes will be shut down for regular maintenance between December 2 and 6. During this time, the chemical rotenone will be administered to kill all fish in a 5.5-mile reach of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal to keep the invasive carp from spreading to the Great Lakes.
The action was revealed in a conference call held November 13 for members of the media. Speakers included John Rogner, assistant director of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources; Col. Vincent Quarles, commander of the Chicago Engineer District; Rear Adm. Peter V. Neffenger, commander of the Coast Guard district that includes Chicago, the Great Lakes, and the canal; and Cameron Davis, senior adviser to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson on Great Lakes issues.
During the treatment and cleanup, traffic through a 5.5-mile portion of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal between Romeoville, Ill., and the Lockport lock will be shut down. The operation will require dozens of boats and hundreds of staff. The fish kill, cleanup and barrier repair together will cost between $1 and $2 million.
Payment has not been finalized, but Davis said the money would eventually be forthcoming from a number of state and federal agencies, because the Great Lakes Interagency Task Force is committed to making it happen. That task force coordinates efforts like this among state, federal and local agencies under a presidential executive order.
New details of the plan emerged during the presentation. The plan was originally conceived when samples showed DNA of the Asian carp in the water, using a testing technique developed by Notre Dame professors that was only adopted in June. But a qualified observer from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has recently spotted an individual Asian carp near the barrier. However, because DNA breaks down after a short time in the water, the presence of carp DNA is considered strong evidence….
The board of the Columbiana County (Ohio) Port Authority voted on November 16 to approve a new lease agreement for Quality Liquid Feeds in connection with plans by the Wisconsin-based liquid feed company to build a $300,000 barge-mooring and bulk liquid offloading site near its processing plant at the port authority’s Intermodal Facility in Wellsville, Ohio, according to the Business Journal.
Quality Liquid Feed was one of the first tenants at the Wellsville site when it signed its initial lease on January 1, 2000.
Under the terms of the new lease, the company will pay the port authority a one-time fee of $18,450 by the end of December, and an additional fee for every barge that uses the loading facility. The fee will be about 15 cents per ton, adding up to about $400 for each barge-load, said the port authority’s chief executive officer, Tracy Drake.
Quality Liquid Feeds receives about three barge-loads monthly of molasses. The molasses will be sent via pipeline from the barge facility to the company’s processing plant nearby.
Drake said other tenants will be able to use the facility, with the port authority dividing the revenues with Quality Liquid Feeds….
It’s hard to read a boat christening story in The Waterways Journal and not see the name of Dale’s Welding of Plaquemine, La., as a vendor of aluminum doors, winches or dripless shaft bearings.
But when Dale Lively started the company in 1981, it was just supposed to be a part-time venture. He bought a heliarc welding machine for aluminum and a stick welding machine for steel and set them up in a shed behind his father’s house to do jobs after hours.
The electric power service box was mounted on a pole left over from a house trailer. His work table was an old unused septic tank.
At the time, Lively was working full-time as a supervisor at nearby Verret Shipyard on the Port Allen Route of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway (GIWW). After hours, he did small jobs welding a commercial truck chassis or a friends’ aluminum fishing boat and trailer.
“I never intended to compete with the shipyards,” Lively said. “I saw a need to do small jobs and make things out of aluminum. And I could repair just about anything.”…
An innovative IT company is partnering with river carriers, including McGinnis Inc., to introduce a system of video-camera surveillance along the Ohio, Kanawha, and Big Sandy rivers. The project, called Eyes on the River II, is funded by grants from local, state, and federal authorities under the rubric of improving homeland security and is expected to keep developing for perhaps another five years.
At the heart of the effort is a 10-year-old company called ConnectLink. Founded originally as a dialup Internet service provider, it moved into wireless service as a wireless Internet service provider (WISP), and found that its business exploded. It focused on smaller clients along the river valleys, including many small cities, ports and municipalities. The company says its current 1,600 clients are located in 38 counties in Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky.
Here’s how Eyes on the River II works.
According to Bob Cochran, sales manager for ConnectLink, the company was approached by the Ohio Department of Public Safety, Division of Homeland Security, with a plan to install video cameras on towboats to increase river surveillance. “We already had a wireless ‘backbone’ along the river, so I guess we were a shoe-in for this project,” said Cochran.
McGinnis, already a ConnectLink customer, responded enthusiastically to a suggestion to test the concept. McGinnis applied for four security grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to place the cameras on its towboats, and ConnectLink applied for other grants….
The Alabama State Port Authority (ASPA) issued on November 12 a request for proposals to lease and operate the Pinto Island Steel Terminal, a $100 million facility scheduled to be complete by the end of 2009.
The successful bidder would lease the facility, perform day-to-day operations, handle staffing and maintain the equipment.
“Our original plan was to run Pinto Island ourselves, but we got so many expressions of interest that we decided to put out the RFP to see how much interest was really out there,” said Jimmy Lyons, director and chief executive officer of ASPA.
The terminal has a standing commitment to transfer from ship to barge inbound steel slabs for the new ThyssenKrupp Steel USA plant set to open in north Mobile County in early 2010. About 80 percent of the facility’s space is committed to TK. But the rest is open for public use, the port authority said in a press release.
The Pinto Terminal is designed to handle steel using three cranes equipped with electromagnets. The cranes, which arrived at the sea buoy on November 17, are designed to transfer cargo from ships onto barges sitting in a dockside slip via an automated pulley system. The dock draft is 45 feet….
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