The End of the Story

Early in the week, Eric Muller from Ballard Diving and Salvage sent me a press release and a photograph of the raising of the barge Nehalem from the mouth of the Quillayute River. Olympic Peninsula Environmental News has the story, and here—my goodness, wow, yes— here is Nehalem, back in the world and looking quite chipper considering it was sunk for 13 days: "the crane assisting in putting the dredge barge back on the mother ship Eland, early Sunday morning."

March 7, very early. Thank you, Ballard Diving and Salvage. (Click for larger image.)

Since I did not have the sense to tag the story from the beginning, let me pull it back together here:
February 23 the barge sank;
February 26 and 27, retrieval efforts viewed on the webcam;
March 2, eyewitness images, Nehalem still not rescued;
March 6, eyewitness images, preparing to finish the job.

And, What Happened to the Barge?

If you lost the thread about the barge, it's because I lost the thread. It had totally disappeared off the web-cam—except for a whole lot of orange floating stuff—long about Wednesday evening. I thought they got it, though I'd been watching the cam and hadn't seen it happen;

but indeed it was not rescued: it sank completely.

Saturday, La Push. When I went to look for the gray whales, there was no place to park on the point; partly all the other people with all their other purposes, but also a lot of big Coast Guard and government trucks, and Ballard Diving and Salvage's hummer. They were watching out to sea, waiting; after a couple of hours a great honking tug and salvage barge came chugging in off the ocean after milling around for a while with a couple of Coast Guard cutters, apparently waiting for the tide.

The tug Patricia S. pulling a Quigg Bros. barge, coming in off the ocean (Click for larger image.)Tug and barge entering the channel (sorry for the glare, shooting into the sun) (Click for larger image.)

They spent forever getting organized, unsecuring the equipment, getting ready. Then Patricia S. fastened herself firmly to the Quigg barge and they chugged over to Eland (the dredger mother ship) and used the crane to lift off lots of equipment.

Patricia S. and the Quigg Bros. barge (Click for larger image.)View showing tug, barge, dredger mother ship, and Quileute Harbor (Click for larger image.)Tug, barge & dredger snugged up together, lifting equpment from dredge to barge (Click for larger image.)

The Coasties on the shore said the retrieval attempt would be 'tonight', so I left around 4:45. By the time I got home, the webcam had shut down for the day as usual at 5:30, showing the tug still lashed tight to barge right at the spot where poor Nehalem sank.

This morning it looks like they must have succeeded, the webcam seems not to show the orange warning floats any more; though with the change in the weather the cam might be showing us another planet altogether. Wait. OMG. Action on the cam. Patricia S. just appeared. Not going to try to keep updating...

The Nehalem Still Not Rescued

On Monday morning the West-Quillayute web cam appeared to show the sunken barge about to be winched up onto her mother ship, the Eland. But by noon something had plainly gone wrong, Eland backed out of camera range and Nehalem in the drink again. This was the real reason I abandoned my post at the tribal library as soon as J. arrived to cover, and hurried west.

The same gray windy conditions obtained as in the previous post— well, yeah, it was the same place, just looking west instead of SSW along the beach. I hung out a long time in the weather, taking pictures and sometimes adjourning to the other side of the point to look at the surf on First Beach. Lots of watchers came and went.

The dredging operation's mother ship, Eland (Click for larger image.)

It was high tide. A little runabout boat, Bar Fly, left the mother ship and Did Things With Cables and Anchors over by Nehalem.

Nehalem and Bar Fly (Click for larger image.)

The tide came in more, and things looked worse.

Not Looking At All Good (Click for larger image.)

There were a couple of guys sittin' in a pickup watching. They fish together on the older man's 40-footer (but only in calmer weather than yesterday)(and when there's not a sad little barge sunk in the channel). The younger one lived there on the Rez. He told me that salvage divers had filled Nehalem with inflated balloons, that's what got her afloat and upright (like a sick horse that had been laying in a field and then suddenly got up and was going to live, was how he described it), and they attempted to winch her on board Eland. But there was still too much water in her, apparently, they just ran out of power.

His son had been working on the dredging operation so he knows stuff. He said they weren't done, had about 24 more hours of dredging/pumping to go when they messed up. The story he tells is full of guys thinking one thing and bosses saying another. Long series of bad decisions all bosses's fault. Not clear to me which boss. The captain, the owner, the Coast Guard, the Army Corps of Engineers who let the contract???

When I left, Coast Guard guys and salvage diver guys were standing around on shore where I was parked, waving their arms. I left thinking poor Nehalem was toast, the coasties wanting it Out Of The Channel and were going to have it pulled willynilly to the shore.

But in fact, nothing whatsoever happened today that you could see on the cam. Nehalem nearly vanished under the waves when the tide was high, but by 5:30 PM (when they freeze the webcam), the tide was halfway out again and she was looking Definitely Still There.

West--Quillayute River Cam, 5:29PM, pretty much the same as yesterday (Click for larger image.)

PS. I did a lot of web searching without learning much. A nice picture of Eland, with Nehalem aboard, in happier days.

PPS. A lot of logging trucks on the highway, one carrying HUGE logs, where could they possibly be harvesting trees that large?

PPS. Eagles, and a sea lion.

Guys Waving Their Arms Around

...and other signs of potential action plainly visible on the West-Quileute webcam. Are they really going to raise the barge? (or is it the dredge?) (I have to go out, going to miss it...)

Saturday 5:02 PM (Click for larger image.)

Barge Retrieval

...appears to be in progress... (the Quileute--West cam:)

at 2:17 PM (Click for larger image.)

Hope they have chosen their moment deliberately. Going to be a minus tide -0.8 at 04:59PM.

3:12 PM. No change.

4:12 PM. Don't think anything is going to happen, other than the tide going out. Maybe that's not the barge, and whatever is going to happen is happening off stage right...

at 4:15 PM (Click for larger image.)

Regarding the Wild Coast

One thing I had not told about yet was discovering that the river mouth at La Push was being dredged, and the sediment pumped out over the Rialto Jetty. When I drove around to First Beach the day of the big surf, February 14, you could see all the equipment, the pipes and floating platforms, though not the dredge that day (too much surf?). So I hunted down news articles, and by Saturday this weekend was at least prepared for the sight: on the Rialto side you could see the pipe pumping at the far end of the jetty. On the beach at Rialto there seemed to be fresh, unconsolidated unsorted sand and cobbles accumulating over the last couple of weeks (though perhaps it is also the normal cycle of beaches being shifted around by winter storms, changing their profile each winter, rebuilding each summer.)

Dredging operation, La Push (pumping over Rialto Jetty, February 20, 2010 (Click for larger image.)

Still, the dredging is something which apparently happens every few years and was grandfathered in since before the establishment of Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary.

I decided to think of it mainly as returning the sediment to the beach, a process which has been obstructed since the construction of the jetties confined the river from its former freedom to flow north or south of James Island as it pleased, delivering sediment to Rialto or First Beach at different times. Not alien material, but the rock and sand brought down the Sol Duc River and the Bogachiel from the heart of the Olympic Mountains, delivered to the coast by the Quillayute... as so it is.

I decided not to think too much about the irony of the "Wild Coast" sign by the path from the parking lot at Rialto, my favorite sign in the whole world. I started intensively reading up on beach processes. E.g., "Gravel Barrier Morphology: Olympic National Park...", by Patrick J. MacKay and Thomas A. Terich, Journal of Coastal Research, v. 9, #4, Fall 1992. Lovely new vocabulary, 'beach nourishment', 'barrier stretching', 'storm surge overwashing', and so on.

But that was before the damn barge overturned in the river mouth this morning... Barge with dredge sinks near LaPush -- Peninsula Daily News ; Dredge aided but barge sinks near La Push KOMO News. <<-- that second one has a really depressing picture.

Some places are wilder than others, but no place is wild.