As the sun on the dredging season in the Midwest inland areas began to set, operations were starting to heat up on the east coast for J.F. Brennan Company (Brennan). For a third straight year, Brennan has had the opportunity to procure work in the milder maritime climate throughout New England during the winter months. These months are key for in-water work on the east coast as they provide opportunities to revitalize salt marshes, re-nourish beaches and restore navigation outside of the fish migration and spawning windows. Generally, this work has been undertaken in and near the coastal salt marshes adjacent to the smaller resort communities.

Brennan blog posts were viewed 13,622 times in 2019. Reviewing our most-searched blog topics helps us construct a list of the marine industry's most critical topics and those most pertinent to our company. So, what were the most-searched topics?

As a marine solutions company, J.F. Brennan Company, Inc. (Brennan) faces a unique array of regulations and rules. While every company deals with regulations, most deal with rules that impact operations only on land or only in the water. We are accountable for regulatory requirements in both areas and have been for years. So, what's changed and what are we doing about it? 

We’re nearly halfway through 2019, and unless you’ve been in a cave or under a rock, you understand that the environmental market is exploding right now. I have been in the environmental industry for 32 years (wow that’s a long time), and I do not believe I have ever experienced this much activity. The size, scopes, and complexities of our current projects are overwhelming. J.F Brennan Company (Brennan) is extremely fortunate to have a very busy, robust workload this year with some exciting projects underway, and more that are set to begin once fish windows open. Based on our own surplus of work and activity, I wanted to share my observations and discuss the current state of the environmental community from a dredging contractor’s perspective.

Dredging projects are complex and involve many components and significant planning before operation. The intricacy of these projects means that pricing is often multifaceted. Here are seven common areas that drive overall costs on a dredging project.

Why Add Polymers?

One of the biggest challenges on a dredging project is managing the water that is excavated and transported with the sediment. On hydraulic dredging jobs where sediment and water are pumped through a pipeline as a slurry, water can account for 90+ percent of the volumetric flow. After the slurry reaches the disposal area, the water must be separated from the sediment, collected, and often clarified or treated. This process must happen as fast as the water is being pumped, which for a 12-inch cutterhead dredge could be 5,000 gallons per minute.

Our experience in wetland habitat restoration began decades ago with the Upper Mississippi River Restoration Program (UMRR), the largest restoration program ever undertaken on a major waterway worldwide.  Since then, restoring marshes, wetlands, and highly sensitive ecosystems along inland and coastal waters nationwide has been a main initiative.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies a dredge operator as a person who removes sand, gravel, or other material in order to excavate and maintain navigable channels in waterways. In the industry, we call the dredge operator a leverman. This is a historical remnant of the days when the pilothouse, or lever room, was full of mechanical levers that controlled various parts of the dredge. The levers eventually gave way to computerized control systems...

All Systems Go

At Brennan, we utilize hydrographic survey systems to measure progress on all of our dredging projects. These systems typically include a positioning system, such as RTK-GPS, and a multi-beam echo-sounder. The Real Time Kinematic, Global Positioning System, or RTK-GPS, is a precise satellite navigation tool, whereas an echo-sounder is a sonar device for measuring depth. Combining the two allows us to achieve very accurate measurements on the location of the river bottom. We take the data points created during these measurements and create a 3-dimensional model using Hypack® software. By running a survey before we dredge, and then one afterward, we can create two models and compare them to one another. The difference between the two models is the total volume of in-situ yardage that we have removed. Typically, we are paid by the in-situ volume of sediment (in cubic yards) that we remove so it is very important that these measurements are extremely accurate. Therefore, establishing quality control checks on the equipment before we survey is an extremely important step in achieving accurate measurements.

There is a lot of buzz around the president’s infrastructure plan lately. It is clear that everyone wants better infrastructure, regardless to which party an individual may belong. The biggest challenge to getting what everyone wants is funding, and making matters more difficult, the allocation of this funding is another source of disagreement. As a contractor that provides construction services to owners of infrastructure, it is clear that the waterways are suffering the most from lack of investment.