Dredging gets under way

A pipe spews sediment from the harbor bottom as the long awaited federal channel dredging gets underway. The Daily Triplicate/Kurt Madar

And it smells bad.

The Army Corps of Engineers started dredging Crescent City Harbor’s Federal Channel Monday, and there were only a couple glitches.

Originally the dredging was scheduled to start Saturday, but according to dredge operator Steve Crist, it took longer to get things ready than anticipated.

“We finally got to it on Monday,” Crist said. “It took a little extra time getting everything going.”

As the dredge finally went to work,  the harbor’s bottom started pouring out of a pipe onto the small strip of beach on the south- east side of the rocky island.

“I went and checked it out,” said Harbormaster Richard Young on Tuesday. “There is a lot of black mud coming out of that pipe. It’s really exciting to see it finally working.”

“The problem is that they only have a permit to dump at Whaler Island. Any other outflow isn’t allowed,” Young said, referring to the Corps. “The pipe has to be fixed before any further dredging can continue.”

Crist thinks that the pipe may have had a hole in it the whole time and it became worse as work continued.

“We weren’t getting the outflow that we expected at first,” Crist said Wednesday. “Once this gets fixed things should be better, and when we get the booster on it it’ll really be going.”

One other problem, the severity of which won’t be known until Saturday, is how badly the Corps’ dredge will interfere with crab season.

Dungeness crab season starts Tuesday, but commercial crabbing vessels are allowed to drop their pots in the water 64 hours early.

This means that Saturday, Crescent City’s commercial crab fleet will be using the federal channel to exit and enter the harbor.

And they will be using a channel that has silted in enough to make boats travel single file during low tides, Young said.

Crist isn’t worried however.

“The dredge will be out of the way,” he said, “and the more I dredge the more room there will be.”

 Much of the funding for the dredging project  is due to an appropriations bill sponsored by Congressmen Mike Thompson, which brought the total amount of money available to the corps for the project to $4.35 million.

That should be enough, officials say, to dredge both the inner basin channel and the access channel to a depth of 15 feet, which is the depth required by design specifications.