The Newtown Pentacle

- photo by Mitch Waxman

Maritime Sunday is with us once again, happening to coincide with Greek or Eastern Orthodox Easter (known as greester here in Astoria) as well as the 100th anniversary of the well known Titanic disaster. That subject will be explored by everyone else, I suspect, so instead let’s check out the scene on the Kill Van Kull.

from wikipedia

The Bayonne Bridge is the fourth-longest steel arch bridge in the world, and was the longest in the world at the time of its completion. It connects Bayonne, New Jersey with Staten Island, New York, spanning the Kill Van Kull. Despite popular belief, it is not a national landmark.

The bridge was designed by master bridge-builder Othmar Ammann and the architect Cass Gilbert. It was built by the Port of New York Authority and opened on November 15, 1931, after dedication ceremonies were held the previous day.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

These shots were captured while onboard one of the many Working Harbor Committee excursions I attended last summer, and portrays one of those summer days which New York is infamous for. Heavy clouds of humidity dangle, and inescapable temperatures render the entire archipelago in a tropical aspect.

from wikipedia

The Kill Van Kull is a tidal strait between Staten Island, New York and Bayonne, New Jersey in the United States. Approximately 3 miles (4.8 km) long and 1,000 feet (305 m) wide, it connects Newark Bay with Upper New York Bay. The Robbins Reef Light marks the eastern end of the Kill, Bergen Point its western end. Spanned by the Bayonne Bridge, it is one of the most heavily travelled waterways in the Port of New York and New Jersey.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

From this cauldron of wet heat emerged the vermillion hull of a Bouchard tug, the Frederick E Bouchard. It was returning from the gargantuan Port Newark complex, where it’s unknown mission seemed to have been accomplished.

from bouchardtransport.com

From his first voyage at eleven years of age as a cabin boy on a sailing ship bound for China, Captain Bouchard knew that shipping would be his life. By 1915, he was the youngest tugboat captain in the Port of New York.

On July 30, 1916, while on watch of the tug C. GALLAGHER of the Goodwin, Gallagher Sand Co., Captain Bouchard witnessed the infamous Black Tom Explosion, which detonated $22 Million dollars worth of WW I munitions. Always one to set out to accomplish what few others could, he took his tug from the Long Dock at Erie Basin in Brooklyn and headed for New Jersey. Amongst continuing explosions, which blew the glass panes and lights out of his tug, he worked to rescue the 4,000-ton Brazilian steamer TIJOCA RIO, and the schooner GEORGE W. ELEZY, of Bath, ME. Later the US District Court awarded the Captain a salvage award and an additional award for personal bravery, which totaled $9,000. He quickly invested the salvage award to create his own company, Bouchard Transportation Company, which was incorporated in 1918.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

A fairly large boat, for NY Harbor at least, the tug made good time against the tide. Models like this one are used by the petroleum industry to ferry fuel barges from point to point along the waterfront, ensuring that bulk delivery of “product” to local distribution depots happens in a timely fashion.

from tugboatinformation.com

Built in 1975, by Halter Marine of New Orleans, Louisiana (hull #437) as the Frederick E. Bouchard for Bouchard Transportation of Melville, New York.

She is a twin screw tug rated rated at 3,900 horsepower.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

Omnivorous, of course, the Frederick E Bouchard has also been personally observed handling non volatile cargos as well. You have to stay busy in the maritime industry, and cargo is cargo. The actual nature of the cargo may change, requiring special handling dictated by custom and regulations, but at the end it’s physics and profit margin that define the mission carried out by maritime professionals.

from auxguidanceskills.info

Law of Gross Tonnage

The law, which is more common sense then explicitly written in the code, goes like this: “The heavier vessel always has the right-of-way.”

This is based on simple Newtonian physics. Newton’s first law talks about objects in motion stay in motion unless another force is acted upon it. In other words, if a boat is moving a 5 mph east and you were in the vacuum of space, it would never stop traveling east at 5 mph. However, we all know when we stop our engine on our boat, we slow down.

How long it takes to go from 5 mph to zero, depends on wind, and current. Even if there was no wind or current, we’d still slow down, because the water itself provides friction upon the hull of the boat, and that in itself acts as a brake.

We all have, by observation found that the bigger the object, the longer it takes to slow down. Newton’s second law of physics talks about how the amount of force required to move an object is inversely proportional to the mass of the object.

So, if a tug and barge were traveling down a narrow channel, and you stopped your boat 1,000 feet away, right in front of the tug and barge; and, if the master of the tug saw you immediately; and if the master of the tug immediately began to stop the tug and barge; you’d have less than one minute to move your vessel.

Because if you didn’t move your vessel in less than 60 small seconds, the tug and barge would just run right over you. It would be impossible for the master of the tug to stop, based of the collective mass of both the vessel and the barge, in 1,000 feet.

The law of gross tonnage is un-relenting. It is a fact of life. What also is a fact of life, is that you should not depend on the master of the tug or any other large vessel is able to see you, either visually or on radar.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

As mentioned at the start of this post, today is Easter Sunday to adherents of the Eastern Orthodox church, but oddly enough, it coincides with a decidedly goddess based celebration which the Roman Empire celebrated called Fordicidia.

from wikipedia

In ancient Roman religion, the Fordicidia was a festival of fertility, held April 15, that pertained to animal husbandry. It involved the sacrifice of a pregnant cow to Tellus, or Mother Earth, in proximity to the festival of Ceres (Cerealia) on April 19.

On the Roman religious calendar, the month of April was in general preoccupied with deities who were female or ambiguous in gender, opening with the Feast of Venus on the Kalends. Several other festivals pertaining to farm life were held in April: the Parilia, or feast of shepherds, on April 21; the Robigalia on April 25, to protect crops from blight; and the Vinalia, or one of the two wine festivals on the calendar, at the end of the month. Of these, the Fordicidia and Robigalia are likely to have been of greatest antiquity. William Warde Fowler, whose early 20th-century work on Roman festivals remains a standard reference, asserted that the Fordicidia was “beyond doubt one of the oldest sacrificial rites in Roman religion.”

- photo by Mitch Waxman

Maritime Sunday is here once again, and this time around your Newtown Pentacle is focusing in on something most New Yorkers wouldn’t believe exists within the five boroughs- graving or dry docks. These shots are of the Cadell yard, along the Staten Island border formed by the Kill Van Kull.

from wikipedia

A floating drydock is a type of pontoon for dry docking ships, possessing floodable buoyancy chambers and a “U” shaped cross-section. The walls are used to give the drydock stability when the floor or deck is below the surface of the water. When valves are opened, the chambers fill with water, causing the drydock to float lower in the water. The deck becomes submerged and this allows a ship to be moved into position inside. When the water is pumped out of the chambers, the drydock rises and the ship is lifted out of the water on the rising deck, allowing work to proceed on the ship’s hull.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

Tugs, in particular, take a lot of abuse. Towing hundreds of millions of tons through choppy waters puts terrific strain on their hull and superstructure. Just like the family car, they occasionally need to head for a garage to be inspected and repaired- or just painted to avoid the corruption of oxidation.

from caddelldrydock.com

CADDELL DRY DOCK AND REPAIR CO., INC (Caddell) accommodates a wide variety of marine vessels on its floating dry docks and piers. The Caddell facility is one of the largest full service shipyards in the New York Metropolitan Area. In addition to our dry docking services, we offer pier side repair work available on our network of eight piers with crane operations able to extend up to 200′ and capable handling loads up to 6500 tons. Caddell has carried on the noble maritime tradition and legacy of a uniquely exceptional shipyard by providing quality and prompt service at competitive prices for the surounding New York City region for more than a century.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

Like a lot of heavy industries, the graving docks have largely left New York City. Large facilities at Atlantic Basin in Red Hook and other places have simply been left to rot away. The ones in Staten Island seem to be hanging on, doing essential work that keeps the harbor moving.

from globalsecurity.org

Building and repairing boats and ships was Staten Island’s most important industry before the First World War. One of the Island’s earliest and most important shipyards belonged to William and James M. Rutan. Their shipyard produced about a 100 schooners and sloops per year. There were 17 shipyards on Staten Island by 1880, located on the North Shore, in Stapleton and in Tottenville. Tugs, propeller yachts and coal barges were built there. US Navy and international shipping in the late 1800s produced a need for large shipyards. They could be found along the Kill van Kull near Mariners Harbor and Port Richmond. In 1901-1902, Townsend and Downey Shipyard built the Meteor III, an imperial yacht for Kaiser Wilhelm. By the 1920s, 18 shipyards employed 6,800 people.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

This is from the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and shows the other sort of drydock, a granite pit outfitted with sea walls and gargantuan pumping mechanisms that can accommodate all but the very largest shipping.

from wikipedia

On the eve of World War II, the yard contained more than five miles (8 km) of paved streets, four drydocks ranging in length from 326 to 700 feet (99 to 213 meters), two steel shipways, and six pontoons and cylindrical floats for salvage work, barracks for marines, a power plant, a large radio station, and a railroad spur, as well as the expected foundries, machine shops, and warehouses. In 1937 the battleship North Carolina was laid down. In 1938, the yard employed about ten thousand men, of whom one-third were Works Progress Administration (WPA) workers. The battleship Iowa was completed in 1942 followed by the Missouri which became the site of the Surrender of Japan 2 September 1945. On 12 January 1953, test operations began on Antietam, which emerged in December 1952 from the yard as America’s first angled-deck aircraft carrier.

The US Navy took possession of PT 109 on 10 July 1942, and the boat was delivered to the Brooklyn Navy Yard for fitting.

This boat was sunk in the Pacific in August 1943 and became famous years later when its young commander, Lt. John F. Kennedy, entered politics.

At its peak, during World War II, the yard employed 70,000 people, 24 hours a day.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

There’s a whole lot of dredging going on.

It seems that the Harbor of NY itself is desirous of silting up, which would destroy its value as a commercial port. What the Harbor is actually doing is attempting to revert to the shallow estuary it once was, following the methodologies set down by nature, but this would impede navigation and be catastrophic for both the economic and urban activities of man.

When the terrorist is nature incarnate- the Marines, Army, or Air Force can’t help you at all. Forget about Homeland Security, for any problem that involves a whole lot of dredging you send in the United States Army Corps of Engineers!

from nan.usace.army.mil

New York Harbor encompasses approximately two-dozen separately authorized and maintained Federal navigation channels. These projects, whose authorized depths vary from 8 feet to 50 feet, along with the privately operated berthing areas, generate approximately 1 to 2 million cubic yards of sedimentary material annually from maintenance dredging alone. Further, several of these channels are either under construction or in plans for deepening in the upcoming years to accommodate larger vessels calling at the port. The construction of these deeper channels will also generate substantial amounts of dredged material. The DMMP process seeks to identify and implement options to manage the material generated from both the federal and non-federal maintenance and deepening of the Port through the year 2065.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

The USACE has over the course of time reshaped the course of mighty rivers, eradicated tall mountains, and they’ve even bent the Helegaat to its will. The USACE has powers and abilities far beyond those of ordinary men, which they employ in a neverending battle for the American Way. In the case of the modern dredging observed around the Kill Van Kull and Port Newark, the Corps are ensuring that the soft bottom of the waterway will be deep enough to allow an enormous class of cargo ship called “Panamax” to safely navigate the port.

This involves the movement and dispersal of a whole lot of dredging spoils.

from nytimes.com

For more than a decade, workers using giant digging machines have scooped up enormous mounds of rock, clay, sand and silt from the waters around New York to deepen the shipping channels to accommodate giant cargo vessels that will navigate the widened Panama Canal starting in the middle of the decade.

The dredging has produced millions of cubic yards of muck.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

There’s a few different machines which are involved in this sort of thing, and not just the claw bucket derricks which are filling barges in these shots. Lots of private contractors actually do the work, with a few key players getting the lion’s share.

Some effort has been made to find shots of these various devices- photos which a humble narrator clearly remembers shooting- but they are currently lost amongst the nearly 20,000 shots which I’ve obtained and uploaded for usage at Newtown Pentacle in the last few years.

As far as my hard drives go, there’s a whole lot of dredging that needs to be done.

from epa.gov

The Administrator of the EPA and the Secretaries of the Army and of Transportation agreed to close the Mud Dump Site for disposal of dredged material in their 1996 Three Party Letter. This was in response to surveys that had shown that contaminants in the dredged material caused sediment toxicity and bioaccumulation effects in estuarine organisms. For example, worm tissue at the disposal site was found to accumulate dioxins, and both dioxin and polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) contamination was found in lobsters. Individual elements of the aforementioned data do not prove that sediments within the HARS are imminent hazards to the New York Bight Apex ecosystem, living resources or human health. However, the collective evidence presents cause for concern, and justifies the finding that a need for remediation exists, that the site is Impact Category I (see, 40 CFR 228.10), and that the site should be managed to reduce impacts to acceptable levels.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

There’s little controversy around the idea that the government needs to keep these channels open, and lots of acrimony about what to do with the often toxic materials which are brought up to the surface. According to most sources, the sediment which rests on the floor of the harbor contains a cocktail of industrial leave behinds. Concerns are also voiced about sediments which reenters the water column and proceeds to swirl and shoal in new places.

Which brings us back to “What do you do with a whole lot of dredging spoils?”.

from nan.usace.army.mil

To accommodate the increasing need for the disposal of the assorted material, The Office of Supervisor of New York Harbor was established by an act of Congress in 1888. The Harbor Supervisor, acting through the Office of the Chief of Engineers (of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers), was responsible for the designation of specific disposal sites and for ensuring that ocean disposal would not be detrimental to navigation or pollute adjacent beaches (Williams and Duane, 1974).

Materials including garbage, city refuse, cellar dirt (natural rock and soil excavated during building construction), floatable materials, and sediments derived from dredging during the maintenance, deepening and construction of new channels in New York Harbor, were dumped at specific locations in the New York Bight Apex. Records indicate that approximately six locations were selected to receive this wide range of materials. As the material accumulated at these locations, the sites were relocated farther seaward where increased water depths alleviated concerns of potential navigation threats posed by accumulation of materials.

Hydrographic data spanning the period from 1845 to 1934 revealed that mounds of material were being formed in the general area of the submerged Hudson Shelf Valley (Christiaensen Basin), the Ambrose Light Station (Diamond Hill), and the Scotland Light Buoy. By 1914, shoaling at one of the sites reserved for dredged material and cellar dirt became a critical factor in the decision of the Supervisor of New York Harbor to separate the site usages and thus segregate the material being disposed at each site.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

Were there just some seemingly limitless abyss, an infinity of dark and cold which might just swallow up the sins of the world. Indigo, this ideal dump would boast colossal pressure and unimaginable cold whose combination might vouchsafe whatever poisons you might secret away against future discovery. Some sunken Grand Canyon, which might be neither too far, nor too close.

This would be a great place, a historic one, to dispose of a whole lot of dredging spoils.

from wikipedia

The Hudson Canyon is a submarine canyon that begins from the shallow outlet of the estuary at the mouth of the Hudson River. It extends out over 400 nmi (740 km) seaward across the continental shelf finally connecting to the deep ocean basin at a depth of 3 to 4 km below sea level. It begins as a natural channel of several kilometers width, starting as a 20-40 m depression at Hudson Channel southward from Ambrose Light, then carving through a deep notch of about 1 km depth in the shelf break, and running down the continental rise. Tidally associated flows of about 30 cm/s (1 km/h) up and down the deeper parts of the canyon have been recorded. As silt, sand and mud are carried down the Hudson River, they flow into the canyon and out into the deep sea.

The Hudson Canyon proper is located about 100 miles (160 km) east of the mouth of the Hudson River off the New Jersey coast. Its walls rise three-quarters of a mile from the canyon floor making it comparable to the Grand Canyon, whose cliffs are over a mile deep and 270 miles (430 km) long. It is the largest known ocean canyon off the East Coast of the United States, and one of the largest submarine canyons in the world. The canyon is located near the 100 meter isobath on the continental shelf and is 2,200 m (7,217 ft) deep at the base of the continental slope. Over an 80 km (50 mi) distance, the average slope of the canyon floor is 1.5°. At this point the canyon is as much as 12 km (7.5 mi) wide (from east rim to west rim) and as much as 1,100 m (3,609 ft) deep from canyon rim to canyon floor across the continental slope. The floor of the canyon is less than 0.5 km (1,640 ft) wide across the upper part of the slope and broadens to about 0.9 km (~3,000 feet) at the base of the slope.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

The deeps have been explored a bit, but not enough, by the federal agency NOAA. They report that the canyon is littered with sunken sailing ships, indian canoes, even ocean going diesel freighters of relatively recent vintage. Can you imagine, all there is, that might be down there?

from pubs.usgs.gov

The 150-km-long Hudson Shelf Valley, the largest physiographic feature on the mid-Atlantic continental shelf, bisects the New York Bight region. The Valley is the submerged seaward extension of the ancestral Hudson River drainage system that, unlike other valleys on the Atlantic shelf, has not been filled with sediment. A survey of the topography and backscatter intensity of the valley has been carried out using a Simrad Subsea EM 1000 multibeam sea floor mapping system. The valley head is located in a broad shallow basin and extends offshore 5-40 m below the shelf surface to a seaward terminus at a shelf-edge delta. The valley can be divided into upper, middle, lower and outer sections based on the topography, surficial sediments, and drainage pattern. The middle valley is characterized by 5 local topographic lows along the valley axis that have relief of 3-11 m below the valley floor. The northwestern portion of the study area has been affected by disposal of dredged and other materials since the late 1800′s. Part of this area has been designated as the Historic Area Remediation Site (HARS). The sea floor of the HARS is being remediated by placing at least a one-meter cap of clean dredged material on top of the existing surface sediments that exhibit varying degrees of degradation. A large field of sand waves is located in the lower valley in 70-80 m water depth that cover an area approximately 30 km long and 4 km wide. This sand wave field is hypothesized to be part of a flood deposit that formed as a result of the break-out of glacial lakes in upstate New York approximately 13,500 years BP. In the eastern-most part of the survey area in water depths greater than about 110 m, the sea floor is marked by long narrow northeast-southwest-trending grooves that are interpreted to be iceberg scour marks.

ALSO:

March 5th, as in Monday night:

Riverkeeper and NCA ask: How’s the Water? How’s Newtown Creek?

Join Riverkeeper and the Newtown Creek Alliance for a presentation on water quality in the Hudson River Estuary and its tributaries, focusing on the waters around Manhattan Island and in Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal and Newtown Creek.

March 5, 2012, 7:30PM to 9:30PM

Brooklyn Brewery, 79 North 11th Street, NY map

and March 6th, as in Tuesday

- photo by Mitch Waxman

Recent activities had carried your humble narrator to… Staten Island… A friend’s photography was included in a gallery exhibit at the venerable Snug Harbor, and wishing to both show support for another photographer and to witness his work in print form- I began the long journey from Astoria in Queens to the outermost of boroughs. After exiting the ferry, I was titillated by the sudden appearance of the gargantuan “Hanjin Lisbon” being guided toward the Kill Van Kull by two Moran tugs.

from marinetraffic.com

• Hanjin Lisbon Vessel’s Details
• Ship Type: Cargo
• Year Built: 2003
• Length x Breadth: 278 m X 40 m
• DeadWeight: 67979 t
• Speed recorded (Max / Average): 21 / 20.6 knots (20.6 knots = 23.7060566 mph)

- photo by Mitch Waxman

Like all the ocean going vessels of its type, the Lisbon is a lumbering monster of a ship. Nearly 1,000 feet in length, the cargo ship was most likely headed to the Port facilities at Newark Bay, and requires the use of tender boats to navigate the relatively narrow and hazard fraught coastal leg of its journey to New York harbor from some impossibly foreign port. It’s titan engines and onboard electronics can propel the ship through open ocean with great accuracy, of course, but the giant cargo ship can’t exactly “stop on a dime”.

from marinetraffic.com

MARION MORAN Vessel’s Details

• Ship Type: Tug
• Year Built: 1982
• Length x Breadth: 39 m X 12 m
• DeadWeight: 10 t
• Speed recorded (Max / Average): 14.5 / 8.9 knots
• Flag: USA [US]
• Call Sign: WRS2924
• IMO: 8121812, MMSI: 366941020

- photo by Mitch Waxman

Tugboat and towing services of the modern era, like Moran towing, are inheritors of centuried wisdom passed down from generations of mariners. The complex currents, mores, and eddies of the harbor are well known to the crews of these vessels and their job includes guiding such massive visitors to the port into safe harborage. Two tugs were observed at work, the Marion Moran and the Gramma Lee T. Moran.

from tugboatinformation.com

Moran Towing began operations in 1860 when founder Michael Moran opened a towing brokerage, Moran Towing and Transportation Company, in New York Harbor. In 1863, the company was transformed from a brokerage into an owner-operator of tugboats when it purchased a one-half interest in the tugboat Ida Miller for $2,700. Over time Moran acquires a fleet of tugboats. It was Michael Moran who painted the first white “M” on a Moran tugboat stack, in 1880.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

Iconic, Moran tugs are distinguished their large white “M” logo and the white and maroon “color way” which allows them to be identified at great distances across the harbor. Like all tugs, they are built with highly reinforced steel superstructures and powerful engines that allow them to pursue an occupation which requires the ability to precisely handle tonnages which are clumsy and thousands of times their own weight.

from morantug.com

The LEE T. MORAN is an expression of brute power and utility that belies the refinements of technical engineering below her waterline. There, twin ports are cut into the steel hull to make room for the tug’s Z-drive units. On the floor of the shop they look like the lower units of giant outboard engines. Made by Ulstein, a subsidiary of Rolls-Royce, the Z-drive functions much like an outboard. Imagine two outboards extending straight down through the hull, each having the ability to rotate 360 degrees. That makes even a heavy, 92-foot tug with a 450-ton displacement very maneuverable. “It can turn on a dime,” says Doughty. “The hull bottom is slightly flatter to adjust to the two drive units. By turning each drive out 90 degrees, the captain can go from full-ahead (14 knots) to a dead stop in no time.”

- photo by Mitch Waxman

Containerized shipping is what makes the modern world tick, of course, and has enabled the business model of “just in time delivery” to take hold. The steel boxes which adorn the Lisbon’s decks will be unloaded by Gantry Crane at the dock and will find their way onto either rail or truck for delivery to the final consignee. What isn’t commonly known about these cargo ships is that ordinary people can book passage onboard, finding accommodation in a variety of staterooms, and cruise the world on a proverbial “slow boat to china”.

from hanjin.com

Hanjin Shipping (http://www.hanjin.com President& CEO Young Min Kim) is Korea’s largest and one of the world’s top ten container carriers that operates some 60 liner and tramper services around the globe transporting over 100 million tons of cargo annually. Its fleet consists of some 200 containerships, bulk and LNG carriers.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

The mind reels at such suggestions, and your humble narrator is both titillated at the notion of meeting and interacting with the sailors onboard (undoubtedly Koreans, Tagalog, and Chinese- citizens from all over the manufacturing hubs of the Pacific) and terrified by the lore and knowledge they must carry with them about the true nature of the world. Often these cargo ships will encounter pirates, terrorists, and other malingering forces on both the open sea and in coastal waters. Perhaps they have other experiences, of the sort which sailors do not discuss with outsiders, which only a hip pocket flask of raw whiskey might pry out of them.

from wikipedia

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was formed in 1921 and the Newark Bay Channels were authorized by the Rivers and Harbors Acts in 1922. Shipping operations languished after the war, and in 1927, the City of Newark started construction of Newark Airport (now known as Newark Liberty International Airport) on the northwest quadrant of the wetlands which lay between Port Newark and the edge of the developed city. Port Authority took over the operations of Port Newark and Newark Airport in 1948 and began modernizing and expanding both facilities southward. In 1958, the Port Authority dredged another shipping channel which straightened the course of Bound Brook, the tidal inlet forming the boundary between Newark and Elizabeth. Dredged materials was used to create new upland south of the new Elizabeth Channel, where the Port Authority constructed the Elizabeth Marine Terminal. The first shipping facility to open upon the Elizabeth Channel was the new 90-acre (36 ha) Sea-Land Container Terminal, which was the prototype for virtually every other container terminal constructed thereafter.

The building of the port facility antiquated most of the traditional waterfront port facilities in New York Harbor, leading to a steep decline in such areas as Manhattan, Hoboken, and Brooklyn. The automated nature of the facility requires far fewer workers and does not require the opening of containers before onward shipping.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

Your humble narrator has been enlaced in several ventures which have required assiduous effort for the last several days. Promissory obligation and contractual agreement precludes revelation of the substance of these recent labors, but suffice to say that sartorial glee will abound about the Pentacle when announcements are uttered aloud.

from tugboatinformation.com

Built in 1984, by Rayco Ship and Main Ironworks of Bourg, Louisiana as the Franklin Reinauer for Reinauer Transportation Companies of Staten Island, New York.

The Franklin Reinauer was the last tug built by the yard, after the construction of three push boats for another company, in 1985 the yard went out of business.

The tug is the second to bear the the name. The first tug that bore the name Franklin Reinauer was renamed as the Matthew Tibbetts.

She is a twin screw tug rated at 2,600 horsepower.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

Pictured in many poses and places in this posting, and presented perspicuously is the tugboat which men call the Franklin Reinauer. Often garish, the “colorway” of each tugboat company is designed to be instantly recognizable at distance. There is something lovely about the Reinauer company’s brand colors of scarlet and orange, which provides primal contrasts with the surrounding azure and cerulean waterscape of New York Harbor.

from fireboat.org

When the Coast Guard called for all assistance, some tugboats were already at the scene with others making ready to assist. The tugboat Franklin Reinauer, under Capt. Ken Peterson and followed by three other Reinauer tugboats, arrived at the Battery seawall around 1130. Peterson said he radioed the MCC aboard the pilot boat New York for permission to go to the Battery seawall to take on passengers. Seeing 10 other tugboats standing off the Battery, he radioed them to come to the seawall. “People started running for the boats and I got off and started directing traffic,” Peterson said. “The first day, we had 27 tugboats on the Battery wall and five at Pier 11.” Tugboats from Moran, McAllister, Turracamo, Reinauer, Penn Maritime, Skaugen PetroTrans, Weeks Marine and other companies responded and continued to arrive during the afternoon. “It quickly became a collaborative effort with Andy McGovern, Ken Peterson and me determining how to best employ all the resources,” Day said.

Fire-fighting efforts at Ground Zero relied heavily on water supplied by two city fireboats and a welcome addition, the ex-New York City fireboat John J. Harvey. Privately purchased by outbidding the scrap dealers in 1999, the boat had been repaired since then and docked at Hudson River Pier 63.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

Luck has placed me at enviable vantages all summer, and an enormous amount of time has been spent on and around the harbor, during which the Franklin Reinauer seemed almost a companion. Everywhere I went, it seemed the tugboat was there too. In the shots above, the Franklin Reinauer was maintaining a static position before the Pulaski Bridge on the Newtown Creek, undoubtedly awaiting the arrival of some stalwart steward of the drawbridge who would open the span and allow it further egress.

from wirednewyork.com

Newtown Creek is woven deeply into the city’s history. Until the Dutch arrived, the Maspetches Indians lived along its banks in what is now Maspeth, Queens. Some believe that Captain Kidd used a friend’s waterfront property there to stash his plunder. The creek was part of a boundary dispute from the mid- 1600′s to the mid-1700′s between Bushwick and Newtown, the precursors to Brooklyn and Queens.

But it was through commerce that the waterway came into its prime.

By the 1850′s, the creek was an industrial center that both fueled and paralleled the explosive growth of New York. Glue factories, smelting and fat-rendering plants, one of the earliest kerosene refinery and other smelly enterprises clustered along the shores of the creek and its little tributaries. The toxic sludge from these businesses got company in 1856, when the city decided to dump raw sewage directly into the water, a practice that continued for decades.

In the 1920′s and 30′s, the creek was widened to accommodate the growing traffic. In its heyday, the bridges that crossed it opened tens of thousands of times a year.

“Newtown Creek was a highway,” said Bernard Ente, a local historian. “It was just boats instead of trucks.” He estimated that 500 enterprises lined the creek at its peak. Large boats brought in raw materials and fuel and took out oil, fat, varnish, chemicals and metals.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

There it is again, this time in the legend choked waters off of Red Hook, and exiting the Erie Basin. A small number of Reinauer tugs and barges are often observed here at Erie Basin, which is known to most New Yorkers for the large Ikea store and NY Water Taxi Ferry service which docks here.

from pbs.org

From the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, Red Hook’s port made it a thriving industrial neighborhood of mainly Italian and Irish American dockworkers. It was also home to one of the first Puerto Rican neighborhoods in New York City. By 1950, Red Hook had 21,000 residents, many of them longshoremen living in the Red Hook Houses, a public housing project built in 1938 to accommodate the growing number of dockworkers and their families. The neighborhood had a tough reputation—with such notorious figures as Al Capone getting their start there as small-time criminals—and its seedy side was immortalized in movies such as the On the Waterfront (1954), starring a young Marlon Brando.

When containerization shipping replaced traditional bulk shipping in the 1960s, many businesses at the Red Hook ports moved to New Jersey—as did the jobs. Unemployment increased quickly as industries abandoned Red Hook, and the neighborhood’s economy underwent a rapid decline. By the 1970s and ‘80s, it became known as being a crime-ridden, desolate neighborhood, severed from the rest of Brooklyn.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

Mundane and sometimes odd coincidences of geography, maritime, and industrial usage create an unbearable historical similarity between Red Hook and Greenpoint which are deeper and more meaningful than some merely visual verisimilitude. Just on the other side of Erie Basin is the legendary Gowanus canal, Newtown Creek’s superfund.

from brooklyncb6.org

The industrial businesses that exist in Red Hook rely on trucking as the primary way to move goods and freight into and out of the area. Heavy truck traffic has had a serious impact on the residential population and most likely contributed to infrastructure failures and the collapse of some of the older buildings in the area. The geological substrata of this coastal floodplain region contains a dense organic layer of red clay (hence the “red” in Red Hook) that exacerbates the longitudinal transmission of surface vibrations. For years efforts have been underway to reevaluate the existing Truck Route network with an eye toward minimizing its direct impact on the residential community while optimizing its intended industrial usage. The existence of truck-based solid waste transfer stations, that provide little by way of economic development of the community, has contributed to the problem of truck traffic in a major way.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

The Newtown Creek and Gowanus Canal have both been largely abandoned by those industrial forces which ruined their honor, but the tugboat has also and often been sighted in the place where these forces find modern occupation- the storied waterway called the Kill Van Kull.

Here is the Franklin Reinauer straddling this currently undefended border between New York and New Jersey.

from wikipedia

The name “Kill van Kull” has its roots in the early 17th century during the Dutch colonial era, when the region was part of New Netherland. The naming of places by early explorers and settlers during the era often referred to a location in reference to other places, its shape, its topography, and other geographic qualities. The area around the Newark Bay was called Achter Kol. The bay lies behind Bergen Hill, the emerging ridge of the Hudson Palisades which begins on Bergen Neck, the peninsula between it and the Upper New York Bay. Behind or achter the ridge, was a col or passage to the interior. Kill comes from the Middle Dutch word kille, meaning riverbed, water channel, or stream. During the British colonial era the bay was known as Cull bay.

Kill van Kull translates as channel from the pass or ridge. The name of the sister channel to the Kill van Kull, the nearby Arthur Kill, is an anglicization of achter kill meaning back channel, which would refer to its location “behind” Staten Island.

- photo by Mitch Waxman

Preparations for a vast undertaking, as mentioned in the first sentence of this evasive post, have finally been completed- a task which Sisyphus himself would have appreciated. Woe, that today I cannot accomplish my sincerest desire to announce these upcoming events. All a humble narrator can say at this moment would be:

Want to see something cool?

Bring a camera, and ID,

Follow me…

from wikipedia

Seagoing tugboats are in three basic categories:

1. The standard seagoing tugboat with model bow that tows its “payload” on a hawser.
2. The “notch tug” which can be secured in a notch at the stern of a specially designed barge, effectively making the combination a ship. This configuration is dangerous to use with a barge which is “in ballast” (no cargo) or in a head or following sea. Therefore, the “notch tugs” are usually built with a towing winch. With this configuration, the barge being pushed might approach the size of a small ship, the interaction of the water flow allows a higher speed with a minimal increase in power required or fuel consumption.
3. The “integral unit,” “integrated tug and barge,” or “ITB,” comprises specially designed vessels that lock together in such a rigid and strong method as to be certified as such by authorities (classification societies) such as the American Bureau of Shipping, Lloyd’s Register of Shipping, Indian Register of Shipping, Det Norske Veritas or several others.These units stay combined under virtually any sea conditions and the “tugs” usually have poor sea keeping designs for navigation without their “barges” attached. Vessels in this category are legally considered to be ships rather than tugboats and barges must be staffed accordingly. These vessels must show navigation lights compliant with those required of ships rather than those required of tugboats and vessels under tow. Articulated tug and barge units also utilize mechanical means to connect to their barges. ATB’s generally utilize Intercon and Bludworth connection systems. Other available systems include Articouple, Hydraconn and Beacon Jak. ATB’s are generally staffed as a large tugboat, with between seven to nine crew members. The typical American ATB operating on the east coast, per custom, displays navigational lights of a towing vessel pushing ahead, as described in the ’72 COLREGS.

Harbor tugs. Historically tugboats were the first seagoing vessels with steam propulsion, providing freedom from the restraint of the wind. As such, they were employed in harbors to assist ships in docking and departure.

River tugs River tugs are also referred to as towboats or pushboats. Their hull designs would make open ocean operation dangerous. River tugs usually do not have any significant hawser or winch. Their hulls feature a flat front or bow to line up with the rectangular stern of the barge.