Safe Harbor Replaces Gritty Adventures : Dredge: Desilting Oxnard waters and widening a Port Hueneme beach are tame jobs for the Ollie Riedel compared with others it has had.

After decades of toil on the Mississippi River and in the Gulf of Mexico, the vessel Ollie Riedel has become a beachcomber.

Since January, the 67-year-old dredge has been sucking sand from the mouth of Channel Islands Harbor and depositing it onto a fabricated beach in Port Hueneme.

The round-the-clock detail might seem a taxing assignment for one of the nation’s oldest oceangoing dredges, built in West Virginia in 1924.

But digging out sand traps and clearing a path for pleasure boats is a breeze for a dredge that cut some of the earliest shipping channels past bends in the Mississippi River and was held hostage for three years by a foreign government.

“It’s a real sturdy dredge,” said Frank Bechtolt, the Western Pacific Dredging Co.’s supervisor on the project. “It’s ridden out some real bad weather in its day.”

“I don’t know of any dredge that might be older and still in operation,” said George Watts, head of a trade group that represents dredging firms scattered across the Western Hemisphere. “They put more electronics on them these days and make them more automated. But fundamentally, the mechanics are still the same.”

For Capt. Bob Crawford, working the 180-foot Ollie Riedel is a cushy job compared to the overseas project that he headed in 1987. While digging a 10-mile channel across the Iraqi desert north of Basra, Crawford said, a group of terrorists fired rifle rounds into his dredge’s control room, seriously injuring one of his crew members.

Said Crawford, 61: “Here, I just sit around and look wise and maybe harass the lever man now and then.”

The $4-million project also has provided a job paying $18.18 an hour plus overtime to Larry Tovar, 22, of Fillmore at a time when work is scarce.

Tovar, an apprentice operating engineer, had not worked since Dec. 6. His union directed him to Western Pacific in mid-February. One of 37 people employed on the 24-hour project, he works as a “greaser,” keeping all mechanical parts lubricated.

Tovar discovered one occupational hazard of the job: seasickness. “My first day out,” he said, “it was a calm day from what everyone was telling me, but I still turned green.”

Powered by a 4,000-horsepower diesel engine, the Ollie Riedel is capable of removing 1,500 cubic yards of ocean floor an hour. In past dredgings of the harbor in Oxnard, Bechtolt said, it sucked up the carcass of an alligator that floated down the Santa Clara River after escaping from a traveling zoo, and dislodged the sunken wreckage of a small airplane whose missing pilot floated to the surface.

The dredge works like a giant vacuum cleaner with an eggbeater on its nozzle. The blades break up the ocean floor, which gets sucked into the ship’s belly and propelled out a metal pipeline kept afloat by buoys running to the shoreline.

The discharged slurry of 80% water and 20% sand is being used to shore up Silver Strand Beach and to create a 3,000-foot-long and 700-foot-wide beach next to the mouth of the Port of Hueneme. The fabricated beach, by design, will be washed southward along the shoreline over the next six to 18 months to replenish eroding beaches near Point Mugu.

Though it dwarfs the 3,600 boats based at the harbor, the dredge gets little respect from boaters, an estimated 90% of whom fail to signal their passing by radio or horn blast as required by maritime law. Capt. Jack Peveler of the Channel Islands Harbor Patrol said the oversight has resulted in at least four minor boating accidents.

Named after the mother of Western Pacific’s owner, the Ollie Riedel has been deployed several times for the biennial dredging of the Channel Islands Harbor and the Port of Hueneme, under contract with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Its one concession to modern times is an 8-by-20-foot catalytic converter attached last year to its smokestack to reduce emissions, at a cost of more than $500,000. Periodic engine overhauls also run about $500,000.

Constructed by shipbuilders in Charleston, W. Va., for the corps, the dredge was first used to maintain the depth of Mississippi River ports and dig shortcut channels past bends in the river to speed passage of commercial ships.

In 1946, the corps sold it as government surplus for $80,000 to a Louisiana dredging outfit that used it for harbor shipping channel projects along the Gulf of Mexico from Florida to Texas.

In 1975, after being resold to C. W. Beam Co., another Louisiana firm, the vessel was sent to work an ill-fated contract for the Mexican government on that country’s Pacific coast, said David Bruce Smith, a C. W. Beam mechanical engineer.

Smith said that when another American dredge working farther south sank 200 feet off the coast during a storm, its owner refused to salvage the exposed vessel, prompting the Mexican government to seize Beam’s dredge and demand a $1-million ransom. It remained in Mexico for three years until the peso’s falling value allowed Beam to get it back for $500,000, Smith said.

The dredge was then steered to Los Angeles, “the most convenient, friendly port we could get it to,” Smith said.

Western Pacific bought it in 1978 for about $5 million for use in Southern California. After the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980, it was commandeered by the corps to clear the Columbia River in Oregon of volcanic-ash sediment that was blocking access to the port of Portland.

Its most recent jobs for Western Pacific included deepening Oceanside Harbor and restoring Sunset Beach with 2 million cubic yards of sand from the ocean floor more than a mile offshore.

Bechtolt said its latest assignment will be completed by the end of this month, after which it will undergo a checkup and maintenance.