On our hike on Thursday afternoon, we had noticed that the equipment that had been staged in the Picnic Area parking lot was no longer there. It had all been moved down onto the beach between there and Fort Macon, and the $18 million Morehead City Harbor Dredging & Concurrent Beach Nourishment project was well underway (see post of December 18). Silt will be dredged from the Morehead City Harbor, a State Port and the deepest one on the East Coast, and deposited on this beach.
The engineer’s description of the project posted on the Carteret County Shore Protection Project was fascinating, at least to this former Town Administrator who has watched sewer plants, water plants, pumping stations, and water tanks constructed over the years.
“A cutterhead-suction dredge utilizes a crane situated on a barge that positions the cutterhead, which looks like a gigantic drill bit, along the seafloor. The cutterhead agitates the sandy bottom, and the resulting slurry of sediment and water is subsequently suctioned into a long tube transitioning into a pipeline that can be extended to a specific target area.”
Two weeks ago, we had seen this head-high pile of pipe on
the beach, and on one of my runs I had passed one of the many tractor-trailer
trucks that had carried them there.
I did a little research after seeing this impressive pile of pipe, and for what it is worth to any curious readers of this blog there are some absolutely wonderful videos out there on the internet; just go to YouTube and search for cutterhead suction dredges. The dredge will be positioned in the channel and sweep back and forth, while the “cutterhead” turns exactly as a drill bit does, and silt is sucked up to the surface on what I think will be floating sections of light tubing that will ultimately connect on land to a mile-long pipeline.
On Thursday, we found that most of
the sections of pipe had been fitted together into several long sections of this
pipeline. “How can that even work?” I asked Martha. “Imagine pumping silt through a pipe a mile long! It looks like it would just pile up inside and
stop! I don’t think it’s going to work.”
There were a lot of folks down on the beach looking at this pipeline. A friendly young man and woman asked us if we knew what was going on, and of course I obliged with an explanation, trying not to act like I was being the smug expert. They were equally amazed. “I think they will pump it all the way to the end, spread it out, then remove a section at a time and work backwards,” I speculated.
Up ahead we saw some flashing lights and heard some beeping. A bulldozer was approaching, and as he neared us we saw that he was dragging a section of pipeline behind him that looked several hundred feet long. I took this video (which I am proud of learning how to post):
As it passed by, we saw that there was another bulldozer behind the section pushing it, as locomotives do on a railway.
I wondered how these sections had been fitted together. The man we were talking to speculated, as I did, that they had been welded, but I know a little about welding and upon reflection I don’t see how this rusty, barnacle-encrusted pipeline had been welded. I wanted to ask someone who really was an expert, but they all seemed to be busy dragging and pushing this pipeline into place.
“Weeks Marine's cutterhead-suction pipeline dredge, the J. S. Chatry, is scheduled to arrive the 1st week in January,” the project website said, “And could begin channel maintenance/nourishment on January 5th.” Until then, readers of this blog will have to wait with bated breath.
Yesterday, the first day of 2021, did not go as planned. We had noticed that the internal speaker on my laptop computer did not sound as loud as it used to, although I had been able to listen to some wonderful Christmas music through new earphones that Martha had given me for Christmas. I researched the possible cause and learned that the best solution was to uninstall the audio driver software and reinstall/update it. The uninstall worked fine, but I spent most of the day trying to reinstall/update it. I dived deep and visited more websites than I can remember, installing and restarting my computer dozens of times. I learned what a High Definition Audio Bus was. I learned that the recommended Realtek ALC3202 Audio Driver for Windows 7 could not be installed for some unknown reason. I even downloaded the Avast Driver Updater and Scanner program, and when I ran it I was told I was off-line, which of course I was not because I had just downloaded it. At one point I found myself beginning to watch what I thought might be an informative YouTube video before realizing that . . . I could not hear it. I finally admitted defeat when Martha, seeing me slumped over my laptop, said, “You don’t look like you’re having fun.” I was not, and so we went for a walk on the beach together. And then I was.
I have a tradition of trying to do things on the first day of a New Year that I would like to continue for the rest of the year. For several years, I have been running in the New Year’s Resolution Run in Highlands, a Fun Run to start the year off on the right foot.
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| New Year's Resolution Run 2020 |
But because of Covid and because we dissolved our running club this summer, and because we are here, there was no Resolution Run this year. But this year we at least walked on the beach and ate some healthy food, and I wrote some poetry and played some music and read a book. And because of my semi-long run on New Year’s Eve, I ran today instead. It was unseasonably warm again, in the mid-60s, and I was determined to make up for a day spent mostly at my computer yesterday. I have been running the final mile of some of my runs out here as fast as I can, and last week I finally got under eleven minutes. That’s what I did again today, thinking almost angrily as I picked up the pace that I would make this count, that I would start the New Year ambitiously, that I would put the hammer down. So it was very gratifying to clock a faster final mile than last week. My fastest mile this year! And my longest run (three miles) of the year, too!
When I returned to the condo, Martha went for a walk on the
beach. She wrote in the sand with a
feather she found and sent me this photo.
Like everything we write in the sand, it has already been washed away by the tide. But it is a New Year, and we are looking forward to it being better than last year (Good Bye 2020!). “Tell me,” the poet Mary Oliver wrote, “What is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” What will we do this year? Martha found this and hung it on the wall (the substitute for our little kitchen blackboard at home), the first quote for 2021.
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