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Boats carrying iron ore don’t do fast, especially when heading upriver. To get around them, structures called “locks” are built, a kind of ladder for ships. Boats at one end, the entrance doors are closed and the water point inside the lock is raised or lowered to fit at the outside point of the doors at the other end. The exit doors are then opened and sent to a new elevation.
The U. S. Army Corps of EngineersIt operates locks at the eastern end of Lake Superior in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, where the tip of the lake falls with 21-foot rapids on the St. Louis River. Marys. La flows about 70 km further east of Lake Huron. Iron ore-laden ships make this critical adventure to the east through the locks about 3,500 times a year to feed the Great Lakes metal industry, and then return empty to Minnesota in search of more minerals.
Because “Sault” “fast” in French and pronounces “so”, the complex of the Sault Ste lifting station. Mary’s name is Soo Locks. The biggest is Poe Lock, named after Orlando Poe, a Civil War engineer who designed the lock in 1895 The existing Poe Lock replaced it in the 1960s, but kept its name.
A new, yet un nameless lock will be built just north of Poe and two narrower locks will be updated. discharge of loads of thousands of tons of concrete.
Here’s the question: in the end, the new lock would probably not be bigger or bigger than the existing Poe Lock. All these paintings and there’s no right to brag about showing up?What happened to the progressive perception of bigger and bigger?
Body engineers that resolve to reproduce the existing padlock is due to the fact that the goal of the assignment is to create redundancy. In other words, engineers should make sure that if one padlock breaks for any reason, the other can accommodate the boat in the lake so that the primary transport paints are not interrupted.
“The challenge is that the existing Poe lock is a single point of failure. Almost all of Minnesota’s iron ore goes through the airlock,” said Mollie Mahoney, Corps Lock Project Manager. “The new lock will be the same size and will be used by two locks simultaneously. “
Yes, however, given that the US government has not been able to do so. But it’s not the first time You’re going to make all those disorders and expenses, about $1 billion, why build the new lock a little bigger with the moderate assumption that long-term ships will be wider and longer and with a deeper draft?
“If the new lock were to be built larger than the existing Poe Lock,” Mahoney explained, “larger ships would be built that might not pass through Poe Lock. Then I would go back to the lack of redundancy. “
Logic is indisputable, even if it turns out to erect an impediment to progress. In any case, Congress sets the dimensions. The two locks will be 110 feet wide, 32 feet deep and 1,200 feet long.
Before the structure of the new lock begins in 2022, two more parts of the allocation will begin: the first, deepening the canal west of the proposed lock with a charge of $53 million, began this year when Nevada Trade West Construction contractor brought 15 to 20 heavy equipment and appliances to Sault Ste. Marie. During the remainder of 2020 and next year’s component, they will create a deeper upstream channel to serve the new lock, reflecting that the canal deepened ten years ago in the downstream aspect of the new lock.
The Trade West team will systematically decrease approximately 7,000 channel feet to a constant intensity of 31 feet, which will mean removing only 6 inches of sediments and loose rocks in the westernmost component of the 300-foot-wide channel. the lock itself, it will be necessary to remove 6 to 8 feet of sediment and rock bed.
The underwater paintings are strangely accurate, as evidenced by the Corps’ resident engineer, Steve Pautz.
“We can get much closer to six inches of the desired intensity. The equipment’s GPS systems provide the operator with a real-time review of bucket intensity. Once the paintings are complete, we will perform a complete hydrographic analysis. “sound to make sure we dig the canal with the right intensity. “
Sediments and rocks at the back of the canal are collected with a Komatsu 12five0LC excavator fixed on a barge with five-foot-long nails, a floating paint platform anchored through 3-pointed I-beams embedded in the back of the channel. . yard, or 8 cu. yd. godet at the end of the pen, the excavator lifts the water curtain and places it on a barge 100 feet long. As the paint progresses, the excavator operator can retract the legs and move any of the barges as needed by the arrow and bucket.
In the initial dredging phase of the deepening work, when aqueous sediments and loose fabrics rise from the bottom, it takes five or six hours to load a barge; at this stage, the barge is undone by a tugboat operator and some other. When the operation moves to the rocky bed removal area, the forged curtains will fill the barge more quickly.
Loaded barges are driven to the northeast and anchored along the north technical wall of the canal. There, an Fuchs MHL360 manipulator with a 2. 5 cu. Yd. The container unloads it into a pair of Volvo A40 articulated trucks. Trucks that send it to an adjacent dump and a Caterpillar D8T tiper spread it.
With the deepening assignment finished at approximately 25%, the mound terrain bordering the canal is already more than 20 feet high.
“We built a hill,” Pautz said, “This holds up a lot and reduces crosswinds. Some captains expect this to make their lives a little less difficult on the channel. “
When the digging barge lacks sediment to dig and begins to encounter the rocky sandstone bed, the excavation equipment changes. Two Volvo EC750 blades and a Komatsu PC360 shovel used in site preparation paints have their long arrows and are supplied with rock-breaking equipment, adding a hydraulic hammer and milling machine. One or the other, glacial sediments hardened underwater will be decomposed and removed.
“We can generate a force of 30,000 psi from an excavator and the rock bed is estimated at only 15,000 psi. The only challenge is to locate a curtain that is too heavy or difficult to cross or a solitary rock that is too heavy to lift. “says Pautz. In that case, the bet is that engineers find a way to move it.
The increase in channel intensity is not the result of sedimentation, Pautz emphasized. Unlike the back of busy rivers where seasonal flow moves and drops a lot of sediments, the eastern end of Lake Superior is too shallow and has been too deep. to deepen because fashion generation produces boats that require more intensity. Today’s 1,100-foot-long, 100-foot-wide ore conveyors extend 26 feet below the surface when loaded and several feet less when empty.
The moment phase of the overall assignment of the lock reaches the structure of a new upstream technical wall to update a century-old wall. A contract for the wall will be awarded later this year and the structure will take approximately two years.
“The existing wall is a mixture of wood and concrete with percussion wood hanging on the side,” Pautz said. “It stretches for 7,000 feet. The new wall will have plank walls that will become a concrete barrier 15 to 20 feet thicker near the lock itself for fully loaded boats along the wall facade. “
The new lock itself, the actual chamber in which ships will rise or go down to some other water point, is still at the point of design and will not be subcontracted until 2022, nor will it be completed until 2027 at the latest. Time will collect the winter months, when contractors may or may not be able to paint in Sault Ste. Mary, where 120 inches of snow fall every winter and January temperatures average minus 11 degrees.
Although the lock will begin to be structured in more than a year, this does not mean that the Corps of Engineers workers is not fully aware of the project.
The leading engineer for the lock paintings, Darin White, said the first task will be to build coffers and dry the narrowest Sabin lock on the footprint of the new lock. The dams will give the demolition equipment and, eventually, the structure equipment an area of dry paints. . The stone of the coffers will be sealed and the soil sealed, in all likelihood it will be an unnecessary effort to avoid leaks.
“I’ve worked on similar projects and water is coming in,” White said.
The dominance between the dams is now two deprecated locks, Sabin and Davis, and will be reshaped into a larger lock and a paved operational domain. As Sabin’s airlock is dismantled and demolished, concrete debris will pass to a filling site and the rock excavated and the earth will pour into the other deprecated lock (Davis), filling it completely. Only then can the structure of the new lock begin.
The structure of the new chamber will require, according to White, 735,000 tons of quarry stone; 35,000 tons of cement manufactured in the United States; and 20,000 tonnes of steel manufactured in the US A concrete power plant will be installed north of the new lock.
First the lock walls will be built. They will consist of a series of concrete monoliths (White compares them to giant Lego blocks) about 70 feet high. Each monolith will be cast into 5-foot-high segments, meaning about 15 flows will be needed. plaster, that is, an area between them will be left, an effective plan because the sautéed monoliths will already have two sides in position when forming The wall will be 10 feet thick at the most sensitive point and 40 feet thick at the bottom.
The floor of the room will be 3 feet of concrete. White said the ground had two functions: the first is to act like a leg of strength, strengthening the back of both walls with one appearance so they don’t move inwards. The walls, White noted, is not the massive volume of water (compressed through the weight of a ship) that pushes out, is the tension in inspecting the earth embankment when the chambers are emptied in both a winter and both during 10 weeks of Cleaning and Maintenance It is at this time that concrete flooring is also valuable as a forged surface for maintenance groups that examine and repair the empty chamber.
“There’s something to fix,” White said of the annual maintenance work. “In Poe, a piece of concrete was missing at one end and a challenge with some valves. You deserve to wait for things to fail as they get older.
Concrete walls will be somewhat protected through the wall armor, i. e. vertically suspended steel bands to absorb some of the effects they have when ships “hit” it.
Each double door valve at the ends of the lock, which are at the top of the top of the chamber, will be 61 feet wide and weigh more than two hundred tons. The doors are also the precise dimensions of the camera. Poe Lock for easy maintenance and minimize spare parts. They will be manufactured elsewhere, shipped to and assembled in place.
When the new lock is in service, like the others, it will be flooded by gravity when a boat moves upriver and wants an elevator or downstream and wants it lowered. minute to temporarily transparent the excess water chamber.
This is the plan at this point, approximately 70% of the way through the design phase. When the contract is awarded and the structure of the locks begins in smart time, some 600 contractors will invade the peak periods of the site.
When the duration of the assignment of a structure is measured in years, it can be simple to lose the attitude from week to week. A lot of things can go through such a long era. But for now, said Pautz, the resident engineer, “we are ahead of schedule. “Ceg