Charleston Gazette-Mail
6 August 2005
By Jim Balow, Staff writer
Bit by bit, cubic yard by cubic yard of concrete, the new Marmet Locks project is rising from the north bank of the Kanawha River.
Don't hold your breath waiting for it to be finished, though. The first barges aren't expected to pass through until 2008 and finishing touches could take another year past then.
The first thing a visitor notices while driving up from Malden and Rand is not the new lock chamber itself or its channel, but a huge pile of dirt - a new mountain, in effect, that rises nearly 100 feet above the road.
"This huge embankment, it stays," said Dennis Hughes of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, on-site resident engineer since construction began in 2002.
Because of strict rules on where the corps can place dirt and rock excavated for the new locks and adjoining channel, contractors are piling it on site.
Like just about everything else at the project, the embankment is massive. Workers from Kokosing Fru-Con LLC, which won the $231 million contract to build the locks, will eventually excavate about 3 million cubic yards of dirt and rock, Hughes said. Most will end up in the embankment, which could rise another 30 to 40 feet.
Topsoil has been saved in another pile and later will be spread back over the site, Hughes said.
Between 200 and 250 workers toil day and night in two shifts. "It's been the day shift getting ready to place the concrete and the night shift placing it," he said. "It's easier to move the forms during the day and easier to cure the concrete at night."
Workers typically pour concrete in blocks, called lifts, 5 feet deep and up to 50 feet long and wide. Concrete gives off heat as it cures, so it's best to start at night, especially during the hot summer months, he said. Even so, each lift takes about a week to cure sufficiently to pour another one on top.
Much of the lock walls has been poured, as have the upstream and downstream guide walls. The walls, 50 feet thick in places, extend down to bedrock. The tallest rise about 50 feet above the floor of the lock chamber - nearly 70 feet in all.
We're talking lots of concrete here, up to 4,000 cubic yards a week. "We've got about 400,000 cubic yards that will be placed. We're at about 200,000 yards now," Hughes said.
When you consider a typical truck holds about 10 yards of ready-mix concrete, that's a lot of truckloads. Kokosing Fru-Con doesn't truck in its concrete, though. It built its own concrete plant on site, complete with a barge access facility. It ships in aggregate (gravel) by barge from Indiana and sand from Ohio, while cement arrives by tanker truck from Pittsburgh.
Local plants probably couldn't supply the proper kind of concrete anyway, Hughes said. The project calls for 3-inch pieces of aggregate for greater strength, instead of the usual 1-inch stones.
Similar to the new Winfield Locks, which were completed in 1997, the Marmet Locks will relieve a shipping bottleneck along the Kanawha. Barge operators trying to get from the Marmet pool upstream to the downstream Winfield pool have to break up strings of jumbo barges and push them through one by one.
"Like Winfield, we're building a 110-foot by 800-foot chamber and it's replacing a lock chamber 56 feet by 400 feet. With the new chamber they can put through nine jumbo barges at a time.
"It takes 21/2 hours to get through the old lock; it will take a half-hour through the new lock, with more barges," Hughes said.
The design is nearly identical to Winfield, too. "What the average person will see, if you look downstream and didn't see Eleanor, you couldn't tell the difference. The building and lock chamber will look the same."
Corps officials plan to keep the old locks once they open the new chamber. "It will still be operational. If something happens to the new chamber, they can use the old one. It will be an auxiliary, just like Winfield."
Work on the project is just over halfway complete, at least in terms of dollars spent, Hughes said. "The contractor's actually working a little ahead of that pace."
Not that everything has gone smoothly. Neighbors complained when contractors used dynamite last year to blast away bedrock in the shipping channel. Some complained about dust and critters that left the site.
The corps displaced more than 200 homes and businesses, taking parts of West Belle. The entire community of Holly Lawn is but a memory.
At the lower end of the nearly 2-mile-long site, the corps is digging a deep, V-shaped trench, lined at the lower end with riprap.
"Burning Springs used to come through here," Hughes said. "It's been relocated. This is significantly bigger than Burning Springs used to be. We're the corps. We don't do things halfway."
At the upper end of the trench, near West Dupont Avenue, the corps is building a wetlands area - two actually - one along Burning Springs, the other along another creek farther east that also runs under U.S. 60 on its way to the Kanawha. It's all part of the mitigation work the corps is required to do, he said.
The corps also will build a fishing access point downstream of the locks, near the temporary barge dock. "There will be a road and a parking area where you can park to fish," he said.
Check back sometime in 2009, assuming the project stays on schedule.
To contact staff writer Jim Balow, use e-mail or call 348-5102.