I am sure most of you know where I work and heard about the high water and flooding that has went on in the last month. This last trip out was the most stressful one I think any of us have ever had due to the conditions on the Mississippi River. It was unbelievable out there! I could not believe they didn't close the river altogether. The day we got on the boat, we no sooner got settled when we got word the Vicksburg (Mississippi) bridge had been hit and the river was closed to all traffic. That first week we were on there, that Vicksburg bridge was hit just about every other day. That current was so strong. There was a lot of debris floating in the water from whole trees, to logs, old tires and all sorts of stuff. That is dangerous since it can come out of the water and onto the boat and do some serious damage to the boat. In the past we have has a window knocked out on the first deck by a log that popped out of the water so that is always a concern and worry.
This debris also can get under the boat and in the wheels and depending on how that hits the wheels, that can cause damage too. On our way back down south, we had just such a thing happen. Something hit one of the wheels so hard, it shut that engine down. It was restarted without any problem so we never slowed down. The next night, it happened again but this time it damaged the wheel so we had to go to the shipyard and get a new wheel. That took about 4 days between wating for the wheel to be shipped down and our turn to be taken out of the water to change them out. One of our problems was a lock line caught in the wheel. It was wrapped around the shaft so the wheel couldn't turn properly as seen here...
and our new wheel once on
A long shot picture of the stern out of the water
(my Captain had a fit when he saw this picture. He was upset at how bad he thought the boat looks saying it needs painting there so bad but there is no way that can be done unless the boat is out of the water. He is just so fussy about how the boat looks to everybody)
We didn't hit any bridges although we were all on pins and needles everytime we approached one and held our breaths until we cleared it, but we did have a pretty scary incident when the tow got caught in several edys at the same time. The one on our left was a big one and it was pushing the boat sideways at 7.75 mph (fast for a boat as big as ours, with a big tow, especially sideways!) into the bank on the right. A smaller one was on the right that would push us back into the big one so we were being shoved back and forth between them. We pulled it up on the boats black box later to see it and it was amazing and scary to watch. Between the two of them, they shoved us into a canal made by the high water, bypassing the regular flow of the river but it ran right back into the river a little further up which was a couple of miles shorter for us. Captain said the only thing that saved us from loosing out tow was how well the deck crew had put it together. He is one of the few that require double ups to hold the tow together but that trip, he asked them to do triple ups. They said not one wire broke during that incident.
On the lighter side. I took pictures just about the whole trip.
This one is showing how high the water is on the levees around New Orleans. We normally do not see roof tops of the buildings on the other side! The water was up 17 feet and at 20, it would top the levee so they opened the spillway to relieve the pressure on the levees. They are still open although the water is now falling upriver.
This is a boat that caught on fire around Baton Rouge on our way down before we got there. Here they are hauling it back upriver. Fire is a really scary thing out there. The saying it "For every gallon of water you put on a fire, the boat is one gallon closer to sinking." I don't think anyone was hurt in this fire and we haven't heard how it started but it looks like it started in the engine room. Where do you go when the boat is on fire? You head out to the tow.
A few shots from New Orleans water front where we spent a day doing tow work. GNO bridges and the cruise ship "Fantasy".
The ship left while we were there so I got a shot of it as it passed us. Those are people you see on the top deck of the boat. They look at us and and take pictures and we look at them and take pictures. LOL!
Hope you enjoyed this.. It was a rough trip for us and hope we don't have to experience that again!
Last is IMT, this is as far down as we go. IMT is the last stop all the coal in the USA makes before it is loaded on the ocean going vessels and sent over seas. This is 50 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. I was assigned to a boat that worked down there for a year and this is one nasty place to get on and off a boat with all that coal dust.
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