Industrial History: Salvaging Barges

We have seen some incidents where barges allide with a dam. Many times the barges come to rest along side and are still floating. Those can be towed away. However, since many runaway barge incidents happen because the river is high and flowing fast, it might take a lot of horsepower to pull a barge back upstream. If the river is running high, all of the gates will be up out of the water. So sometimes a barge will go under the gate. If it goes all of the way, then it is a matter of calling a harbor service downstream and hire them to catch the barge. But if it gets stuck, things get more exciting.

Here is an example of a barge going through a dam. This happened at Mississippi L&D #11.

Screenshot

Jennie Tempel Lyons: I remember this during high water, current at Dubuque. Not that long ago either.

David Webster: I actually passed this tow at lock 10 & was impressed with the rigging that was on the tow... it was built to stay together.

Unfortunately, I seldom see anything about the cleanup operations. That is why this post caught my eye.

John Paul Jenison posted
Oops
Charlie Teal: Looks like an old Sabine Towing barge made to haul junk or wrecked barges!
John Paul Jenison: Charlie Teal I believe you’re correct. More interested if anyone knew what happened.
Brandon Garrigus: John Paul Jenison I think that’s the one that got caught in the dam on the tombigbee.
Rusty Hillman: That's one the Barges from the Tombigbee that BIG River Salvage sawed into to get it off the Dam side.

The comments pointed to a TikTok report about this incident. But I don't have a TikTok account. So I don't even know which dam was involved.

Albert Dewailly comment on John's post

Sabine Transportation is based in Port Arthur, TX. "Approximately 65 percent of Sabine's revenues are derived from coastal tanker operations, 25 percent from inland tank barge operations, and 10 percent from harbor tug services. Sabine operates 38 tank barges, 24 harbor tugs and push boats and six coastal tankers." [marinelink] (It is interesting that they use the term "push boats" instead of towboats or pushboats. The industry is evidently trying to shift away from the term "towboat."

Big River is based in Vicksburg, MS. The following is a photo of one of the two cranes, the D/B MM-16 and D/B Big Gun, that they used to refloat a tipped barge. [WaterwaysJournal]

WaterwaysJournal
[This is one of 11 photos that were posted Sep 24, 2018, of this salvage operation.
Seven photos were posted of the fire that caused the problem.]

BigRiverShipbuilders-salvage

They have quite a collection of A-frame and crawler cranes on barges.

BigRiverShipbuilders-salvage

Screenshot @ 0:31

One of 25 photos of pulling a partially sunken towboat out of the water.

Four photos of pulling a barge out of the Big Muddy.

Eight photos of clearing a sunken barge from near the road and railroad bridges at Vicksburg, MS.

I went back to Apr 2016 on the Big River Facebook page, but I never found anything about cutting a barge out of a dam.

Judging from a satellite image, I think the pedestal crane on the right is barge mounted and the one on the left is on their dock.

Street View

If I back out, I can see their other dock-mounted pedestal crane on the left. This is part of their shipbuilding and repair operation. I first found these three yellow cranes in a satellite view. I was not able to find any of the A-frames at their dock. Do they normally park them at various points along the rivers and coasts to reduce the distance they have to travel to respond to a problem? Or were there that many problems when the satellite passed overhead that all of the cranes were out working? Actually, the cranes are used also to help with construction projects, not just salvage operations so maybe they all were doing work.

Street View

They make their own A-frame cranes. Manitowoc has shown that if you have the equipment and expertise to make ships, you can make cranes.

Big River Shipbuilders posted five photos with the comment: "Building new A-frame to handle upcoming projects. Total team effort. Fab and Machine shop, Shipyard, and Salvage personnel! Everyone doing their part."