Dredging Up a Livelihood From the Ocean Floor

Real estate agents like to tell buyers that the value of land can only go up, because God isn’t making any more of it.

Maybe He isn’t, but the Great Lakes Dredge and Dock Co. has stepped in to fill the void. The largest dredging company in America, the 108-year-old firm and its ungainly $700-million navy of dredges, tugs, survey boats, launches and cranes range worldwide to deepen ship channels, restore beaches and build harbors for sultans and democrats alike.

Great Lakes is at work on the largest dredge and landfill project in United States history, the mammoth Pier 400 development at the Port of Los Angeles. Over the past four years, 582 acres of land that God never planned has gradually emerged from the Pacific Ocean. Barring a major setback, such as the broken gearbox that knocked out the dredge for 40 days last year, the work should be done late next year.

Meeting that deadline depends on 47 laborers, 10 of whom gather blearily, and a bit grumpily each morning before 7 on a dock at Terminal Island for a 15-minute tugboat trip out to the dredge. There’s Tim Cummins, whose father was a dredge man before him and built nearby Reservation Point, where the federal prison is; Little Joe Melendrez, who ran a barge at the Exxon Valdez cleanup; Sheryl Van Sice, the lesbian oiler who keeps getting told she just hasn’t met the right man yet, though it’s funny, it’s only men who say that; and Gary Barnes, the new kid, nicknamed Robin because he’s such an innocent.

Most take shelter below, lunch pails on their laps. Capt. Clay Holley stays up on the deck of the old tug, staring into the sea, which on this morning is the color of new chrome. He is listening to the discontented gulls, to the rumble of boat engines and for the high whine and low roar of the dredge’s motors.

Out of the haze emerges the Florida, a big red spiny-looking crustacean of a ship--the most powerful dredge in the United States. Its main motor produces 12,500 horsepower, enough to run an entire NASCAR race. The monthly electricity bill is $240,000. As it should be, the Florida is eating.

Holley has worked 28 years on dredges, has made the land on which a Saudi prince built a palace, has traded ice and soda with the Sandinistas on a moon-sprinkled sea, has been given everything by and lost everything to a ship that can’t even sail itself. And one thing he has learned: When it comes to eating, there’s no hunger like that of a dredge.

It eats the bottom of the ocean, and it consumes the lives of the men and women who serve it. They go for months without a day off, short on sleep, working double shifts, bartering away relationships back on shore. Like the Florida, you can have your nose in the muck so long that you lose touch with everything. “One day you look up and you’re 50 years old and you say, where’d my life go?” says one gray-headed dredge hand.

But there are compensations. There’s the money, enough to set up a blue-collar man like a martini-sucking lawyer, if he can hold onto it. There’s the water, all around them, a thousand hues of blue and gray and green. Just look out your office window, the hands say when someone is wondering whether he ought to go back to a job on the dirt. More than that, every dredge hand knows every other dredge hand. They’re a club. They work together, drink together, watch one another’s marriages break apart. They’ve all worked the same jobs up and down the coast, moving the same grain of sand from San Luis Obispo down to Mexico.

They know the ocean as well as any dredge. Unlike a tie-choked dirt worker, when they’re done they’ve made something--a beach, a pier, an island. Something that will last.

Shoring Up Region’s Future

The monument in this case is Pier 400, which at the moment looks like a wide beach, a half-mile-by-a-mile trapezoid with a crooked finger of sand extending almost to the mainland. The endangered least tern has built nests there and is thriving. But this postcard placidity is temporary. Soon, the land will gain a skin of asphalt and sprout giant cranes that will be used to unload container ships.

The combined ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach rank third in the world behind Hong Kong and Singapore in container tonnage. A study forecasts a 250% increase in Pacific Rim trade by 2020. After using every bit of space available, the study predicts, the two ports’ capacity will fall short by 70 million tons every year.

Pier 400 is designed to help meet this need. Great Lakes and its partner in the project, Connolly-Pacific, won the contracts with bids of $289 million, and work began in 1994. The project consists of dredging a channel 81 feet deep to accommodate container vessels. The dredged sand and rock is being used to make the pier. Surrounding the new land mass is a 7-mile-long protective ring made of boulders quarried at Santa Catalina Island by Connolly-Pacific. This barricade will guard the pier against high seas.

Because almost every dredge project these days has an environmental element in it, Great Lakes is also building a 166-acre shallow water habitat for fish and birds out by the breakwater near the Angel’s Gate entrance to the port.

Members of the crew see the project the way their fathers and uncles saw it in the era when building dams and bridges was not despoiling the landscape but domesticating it: They’re not just building real estate, they’re shoring up Southern California’s future. “This will be the single greatest factor in the economic boom,” said Cummins, the mate on the day shift and the father of two girls. “I think about my family. It’s their future.”

It’s also important to the future of the company. Great Lakes does $250 million worth of business each year. About $40 million of that is churned out--at 4,700 cubic yards per hour, $4 a yard--by the Florida.

Chewing Up the Ocean Floor

For all its power, the Florida is surprisingly helpless. Think of a 362-foot-long vacuum cleaner sucking up the bottom of the ocean. It cannot even move itself. A dredge like the Florida does not sail the ocean so much as it is splayed on its surface, pinioned by chains attached to five 15-ton Navy anchors.

One of the anchors is at the stern and serves as the leverage point. The other four are at the bow. Two are swing anchors that are attached to the cutter, the device that shaves off pieces of the ocean floor. The cutter is moved by reeling in on one of the swing anchor chains and simultaneously playing out the other one.

Spindled like this, the Florida grazes like a cud-chewer, swinging its head--the cutter--from side to side as it eats. Suspended on its chains and anchors, the cutter grazes over an arc 150 meters wide, moves forward six feet and begins chewing up a new piece of the ocean floor.

About once each eight-hour shift, the dredge reaches the limit of its anchor tethers, and the deckhands race out on the scow--a floating red waffle with a crane winch--to move the anchors. This is when things can go wrong. Moving an anchor is dicey work. A chain can break, or an anchor buoy can pop up on deck and plow into a deckhand.

When the Florida is at work, the cutter is hidden from view, 60 feet below on the sea floor. Every day or so, the crew reels it up to replace teeth or to cut free spools of wire and other trash that become entangled in the teeth. Water and mud dripping from the huge jaw, the cutter looks like something conjured by Torquemada. It is 10 feet in diameter, with an opening 48 inches wide in the center. Around this opening are rows of teeth that look like baby shoes, sharpened to a fine edge. Sand is abrasive, and it wears out the metal teeth in about two days. When the going is hard, a tooth can be blunted in six hours.

The cutter kicks up the sand, while a spinning impeller in the engine room creates a vacuum, sucking the sand into the pipeline that extends two miles to the landfill. The sand and mud shush along at 18 feet per second. On deck at night, the pinging and soft grating of the rocks and sand swimming through the pipe is a constant, meditative rumble, another voice on the water with the offshore winds and the vagrant foghorns.

Ten minutes after the journey begins, it ends at the spill barge, a rusty iron griddle with a little control room and a lounge where Kelton Murrey and Kevin Loyd share meals. If the Florida is the mouth of the project, the spill barge is the tail.

“This here’s the a--h--- of the whole operation,” laughs Murrey, standing on the barge. Murrey and Loyd are well-suited to each other. Both have a smiling, happy-go-lucky looseness that is mostly absent on the dredge.

They watch the muck boiling out of the end of the pipe and measure its depth. When the sea floor rises to 10 1/2 feet below the surface, a tug pulls the barge to a new spot, and the sand begins piling up there. Every spot the barge goes has been mapped out to the meter by Global Positioning Satellites.

The water behind the barge bubbles brown and murky with discharged sand. Gulls and pelicans gather in the muck, not because of any special fondness for mud, but because they know good fishing. Along with rocks and sand--even a sunken boat once--the Florida sucks up fish. After surfing the two-mile pipeline, they are spit out, disoriented but alive, and become the easiest meal of the day for the seabirds.

High up on the Florida, on the closest thing to a bridge, sits Jesse Gist, a square-faced 56-year-old with a bottle of Tums always within reach. Surrounded by a maze of gauges that measure the dredge’s health and job performance, Gist is known as the man in the chair or, more officially, the lever man. (The term dates to the time before joysticks, when a man like Gist actually pushed and pulled big mechanical levers attached to the cutting machinery.) He is the Florida’s confidant and confessor. When something goes bad, he feels it first in the tips of his fingers: a shudder, a hesitation. When the Florida is feeling good, Gist directs her to cut deeper.

“The lever man can make or break a company,” says Gist. “What I produce is what they make.”

Gist and the Florida go back longer than most marriages. He began his career as a deckhand 34 years ago. On Dec. 8, 1995, they made history together. The dredge worked 23 hours and 15 minutes that day, and moved 137,956 cubic yards of muck into the pipe.

Gist says this is a record for suction dredges. “I had no idea we were anywhere near a world record. I knew it was the best day we ever had.”

He was cutting into a 40-foot hill of submarine sand. The pipe was full, and the cash registers were ringing in Chicago. Great Lakes earned about $350,000 that day.

Earning Good Money--at a Price

Unlike a lot of dredge men, Holley, the captain, wasn’t born to it. A balding 48-year-old, he is 6-feet-2, weighs 225 pounds and has the muscled look of a man who could still wrestle an anchor. Holley has one of those soft voices you have to strain to hear, but which carry a gravity all the greater because of it. He has a habit of pitching his voice higher at the end of a sentence for emphasis. Born in the Deep South, he still calls himself a country boy, even though he has traveled the world.

He grew up outside Blountstown, Fla., in a house his uncle built. By age 12, he was making 35 cents an hour picking fruit for local farmers during the summer. He hunted and fished with his father on the Chipola River, occasionally ate squirrel with gravy for dinner, and attended Missionary Baptist Church on Sunday--at least until Holley’s mother ran off with the preacher. Holley remained with his father, who was always a loner. He could go hours without saying a thing, not because he was angry at the world, but because he was simply more comfortable in his own company than in anybody else’s.

Holley learned the same solitary habits. When he’s not at his desk on the Florida, staring at a computer screen, he has his face in a Dean Koontz book, or else he’s out antiquing, scouting up carnival glass the way he and his dad went after crappie and bluegill.

Holley never considered working at something his back didn’t have to be in on. He knocked down trees until the work ran out. Spotting a dredge in a nearby canal, he climbed down and begged for a job. They hired him and he soon learned the one truth of dredging: You can make good money at it, so long as you don’t mind that it chews up your personal life.

The money comes fast, in big chunks of seven-day-weeks overtime. Because the companies would rather pay the time-and-a-half and double-time than stop the dredge, even a deckhand can make $100,000 a year.

At 20, Holley married the 16-year-old daughter of a man who owned a country store in the log woods. “We had a lot in common. We were both raised the same way, to say, ‘Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am.’ We were two country people.”

By the time he was 28, the kid who grew up in a tiny frame house built his wife a 4,000-square-foot home on an acre. By then, Holley was shipping out overseas. He lived in a Quonset hut in the Bahamas, building land for a resort; slept for months at a time on a dredge parked off Bahrain while his crew widened a ship channel; and built a massive dry dock for supertankers in Iran.

He spent 22 years working abroad. Overseas work is two-and-one (or sometimes three-and-one), meaning two weeks on and one week off. The company flew him back home. He tried to catch up on the things he’d missed. He tried to find the time to take his daughter hiking and fishing, but it grew harder to keep up with the pace of his family’s life. By his late 40s, after he’d dug into the world’s oceans from Africa to South America, Holley and his wife were played out--not because of any accumulated bile or secret betrayal, just the withering of a relationship that hadn’t been properly tended.

“Your family gets set in their own ways. You get set in yours,” he says. “When you come home, you feel like a stranger, and they feel like you’re a stranger. You lose contact over the years. I suggested the divorce. There was not a lot of opposition.”

On Father’s Day this year, his daughter, now grown, sent him a picture of the two of them holding a freshly caught catfish on one of their long-ago trips. He has one just like it of him and his father.

Danger Is a Constant Companion

Dredge work has two inherently dangerous elements--heavy equipment and the sea. Put them together and things can go wrong, fast.

Cummins, the bearded, 39-year-old mate who supervises the deckhands, broke his tailbone when a cable snapped and slapped him in the back 18 years ago. He was lucky. It could have cut him in two. Barnes had just signed on in May when he fell into the water. He was breaking open the pipeline at 3 a.m. when a surge of water hit him, and he lost his balance. He jumped for the Twinkie-shaped pontoon that holds up the pipe. He missed and went under. To the dredge men and women, this is called “going swimming.”

“I remember everything being black and dark,” Barnes says. When they fished him out, “everyone shook my hand and said, ‘Now you’re a deckhand.’ ” Like other closed societies where danger is ever-present, dredge workers have a ritual celebration when a new hand goes into the water for the first time. He must buy everyone else a six-pack.

On top of the danger is the exhaustion. The seven-day weeks are only part of it. Every two weeks, the crews swap shifts. The day shift rotates onto the night shift, the swing shift goes to days. “Sometimes,” Barnes admitted one day, “I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.”

Back on the scow, the crew is getting ready to break the line and add a section of pipe. This is when things get tense, because the cutter has to be shut down. When that happens, the company’s income stream on the project plunges to zero.

This is the time when the pressure on the deckhands is the greatest, but it is also the time when the sea yields up its treasures. On the dredge, deckhands are the lowest in rank and privilege. They do the scut work, the jobs about which the others say, “You can’t think it in.” But sometimes fate rewards the deckhands for their labor and their wounds. For when they break open the pipe, they sometimes find things stuck inside, caught by the rubber ridges between sections. The deckhands scoop up the material like roe from a sturgeon. Because gold is heavy, it’s as likely as anything to fall to the bottom of the pipe and get caught.

A lot of gold came up a few years back, where a Navy payroll ship went down in 1895. Cummins found a $20 double eagle worth $1,000. The story of the deckhand in San Diego who stumbled on an 18th century Spanish doubloon has become a legend among dredge hands. Some say he got $16,000 for it. Over lunch in the cramped shipping container they use for a lunchroom on the dredge, one hand chewed on his sandwich and called the story a myth. Then he admitted he was spouting off. “You got to say that, otherwise you’d go crazy. People have had gold fever out here.”

When Cummins gives the signal, Barnes and the other deckhands leap onto a pontoon and start wrestling with a 1-ton ring that connects sections of pipe. They grunt and struggle for leverage in the moving water. It takes too long. Cummins’ anxiety builds in his face. He isn’t a screamer. These aren’t the old days, when you could abuse men up to the point they laid for you with crowbars. He tries to cajole.

Finally, the ring gives and water pours out of the open cavity. There’s no gold in it. They’ve been working on the pipe for more than 30 minutes, and the dredge has not been running. That’s $4,500 gone. They get the barge in place and reconnect the pipeline. “Go, Joe, go!” Cummins shouts as Little Joe Melendrez grapples with the ring.

Now it’s off to move the big anchors on the dredge. It’s all the scow can do to pull them up. One of the anchors is dug in so deeply that Cummins applies every bit of force that the crane winch on the scow will give him. The scow angles down into the water. The sea rushes over the front half of the deck and soaks the crew’s boots.

Holley comes on the radio, his voice as unmodulated and easy as ever. “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one of those [scows] go over,” the captain says to Cummins, “but it’s not a pretty sight.”

Finally, the anchor comes up, caked with mud. It looks like a snared sea beast dripping mud and saltwater from its jaw.

Cummins doesn’t think he came that close to capsizing the scow, but another deckhand has a delightful time retelling the story. “We almost went over,” he says later, needling Cummins while everyone relaxes in the lunchroom.

To Holley, though, the incident was nothing to laugh about. “Ordinarily, I would never embarrass a man on the radio like that,” he says. “But people’s lives were at stake.”

How close did the scow come to capsizing? “So close,” he says, “it scared me half to death.”

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What They’re Making

The Port of Los Angeles is undergoing the largest dredge and landfill project in U.S. history, which will create the massive Pier 400. As part of the project, the dredging firm is creating a special shallow water habitat at the mouth of the harbor.

Dredging extends out 2 miles.

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Sea Bulldozer

The Florida is dredging a deep channel at the Port of Los Angeles, using the sand and rock it removes from the sea floor to create new land for the Pier 400 project to accommodate an anticipated explosion in shipping business in coming years.

3-foot-diameter disposing pipeline on floating pontoons

The cutter stirs up the sand and mud on the sea bottom, forcing it into a pipeline that extends from the dredge to the landfill area two miles away. The cutter is connected to the dredge by a long piece of machinery called the ladder. Periodically, the ladder is lifted out of the water to allow the cutter to be cleaned. The dredge is held in place by 15-ton anchors.

Source: Great Lakes Dredge & dock Co.