The Kentucky Post
5 May 2006
By Dan Hassert, Post staff reporter
The Ohio River has finally claimed Covington Landing.
But much to the relief of Covington officials, the former entertainment complex didn't sink until it had been towed some 280 miles downstream.
For nearly a year, vigilant workers using repair patches and pumps kept the leaky Landing afloat on the Covington riverfront while the city searched for a buyer. When one was found, the complex was razed down to its foundation - two "deck" barges welded together.
A salvage company unhitched the barge from the Covington riverfront Saturday night and floated it to a scrap yard in Maceo, just upstream of Owensboro, on Monday evening. On Wednesday morning, the barge settled to the river's bottom while moored to a terminal operated by Kinder Morgan, according to Jorge Whitley, the independent contractor hired by buyer Midwest Steel Ventures of Illinois to strip the complex and take it south.
Whitley said he warned the terminal operators about the need to keep the pumps running when he signed over possession of the complex at 5 p.m. Monday. He said Kinder Morgan officials decided to keep only two of the 10 pumps on the barge.
"I said, 'You gotta stay on top of it, and if you don't, it'll sink within 48 hours,'" he said. "Forty-three hours later, it was sitting on the bottom of the Ohio." Officials from Kinder Morgan familiar with the barge could not be reached for comment Thursday.
Because the barges weren't being used to carry cargo, the company wasn't required to notify the U.S. Coast Guard of the sinking but did so anyway, said Petty Officer Kyle Niemi, a spokesman for the Coast Guard.
The barges sank about 9:30 a.m. at a terminal outside the river's channel and were about 60 percent under water, Niemi said. No one was hurt, and no damage was done to the mooring site.
He said the Coast Guard inspected the site to make sure there weren't any environmental hazards and would be reviewing Kinder Morgan's salvage plans. He didn't know why the barges sank.
Covington City Manager Jay Fossett said he couldn't help but laugh at the irony of the situation. The city reluctantly bought the floating restaurant and nightclub complex during bankruptcy proceedings in 1997, just seven years after it had opened to great fanfare at the foot of Madison Avenue.
But the city's cost of maintaining the complex exceeded the revenue it brought in, and the city increasingly began to see the complex as an albatross. When the boat sprung a huge leak, the city closed it down and sold it for scrap in December at a huge loss in the hopes of eventually building a land-based restaurant complex at the site.
The barge's sinking "validated all the concerns we had about the boat," Fossett said. "And they had all the (stuff) off it, so it was a much more buoyant boat."