Dredging starts, stops

Silt-filled water spews into a pond out of a pipe connected to the dredge. The work began Tuesday afternoon. The Daily Triplicate/Bryant Anderson

The long-awaited activation of a dredge transferring silt from the harbor floor into dredge ponds occurred Tuesday afternoon, but was stopped hours later  due to a tsunami advisory following an earthquake in the South Pacific.

“It’s great to finally be getting stuff off the bottom of the harbor,” said Harbor master Richard Young before receiving the advisory.

At that point, the dredge was sucking up the harbor’s inner boat basin floor and transporting it via pipe around the basin to the harbor’s dredge ponds.

“We don’t have an exact number, but we estimate that the dredge moves about 100 cubic yards an hour,” Young said. “We’re going to dredge right at the edges of the mouth, and along the inner breakwater until crab season, then we will keep dredging, but out of the way.”

The Daily Triplicate/Bryant Anderson

The reason that the ponds limit the amount of dredging that can occur is that taking dredge spoils anywhere else requires shipping and large additional costs.

Barring any additional tsunami-related damage, the dredge should be operating during daylight hours through December, weather permitting, Young said.

“Unfortunately you can’t operate the dredge during bad weather,” Young said. “So that will be one thing that could cause problems.”

 The current dredging project is one of two scheduled for the upcoming months, and is funded by dollars from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the California Office of Emergency Services.

The second project is the Army Corps of Engineers’ dredging of critical sections of the federal channel, which is scheduled to begin in October.