Esopus Creek Requires Dredging

Posted on May 25, 2011 by Hudson

By ADAM BOSCH of The Times Herald-Record

SAUGERTIES - The Esopus Creek is becoming so shallow that a Coast Guard ship could be forced to relocate to New Jersey or risk being stuck in the creek, a federal lawmaker said.

The cutter, named “Wire,” serves several key missions in the Hudson River. It assists on search and rescue missions and works with local police to deter illegal shippers.

It also breaks ice during the winter, clearing a path for nearly half a billion dollars of products - including heating oil - that travel up and down the Hudson.

U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer has urged the Army Corps of Engineers to dredge the Esopus Creek so that the Coast Guard cutter docked in Saugerties can reach the Hudson River. Schumer requested the dredging Monday in a letter to Robert L. Van Antwerp, commanding general of the Army Corps.

Dredging the Esopus Creek would cost $3.3 million, Schumer said, but there is $5.7 billion in a harbor maintenance trust fund for port projects. Maintenance of the Esopus has been low on the federal priority list because it is considered a low-use waterway, Schumer said.

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Tappan Zee Bridge In Need of Replacement?

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Hudson

By ANDREW GROSSMAN of The Wall Street Journal

When the Tappan Zee Bridge opened in 1955, the state of New York was on a building spree.

Today, the state doesn’t have anywhere near enough money to replace the antiquated bridge, which carries 140,000 vehicles across the Hudson River every day. That has officials considering striking a deal with the private sector to pay for the construction of a new bridge.

If nothing is done, the bridge’s owner, the New York State Thruway Authority, will have to keep spending huge sums of money just to keep the current bridge safe.

New York is in the midst of what the state transportation department calls a “deficient bridge wave.” About 3,000 spans are deemed structurally deficient—that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re unsafe—and will need expensive repairs in the next decade.

The Department of Transportation’s long-term capital-spending plan calls for fixing many of these bridges. But the state rejected a $26 billion five-year proposal and is now in the middle of a scaled-back two-year spending plan that runs out of money at the end of this year. It’s not clear what will replace it.

And the state’s bridge and highway plan doesn’t account for the cost of replacing the Tappan Zee, which is owned by the New York State Thruway Authority. A team of engineers and planners has produced new designs that would carry dedicated bus lanes and maybe, someday, commuter rail service to Rockland County on the west side of the Hudson.

In the meantime, drivers and bus passengers have to put up with longer wait times to cross the aging span. Every day, there’s an average of three accidents on the bridge. Because there are no breakdown lanes, they cause big backups. As traffic increases, those jams will likely get worse. The 140,000 daily crossings could rise to 200,000 by 2030, according to the group studying a bridge replacement.

Figuring out how to improve the Tappan Zee is the easy part. The hard part is paying for it. And the state has a team of financiers scrambling to find the $8.3 billion needed to replace it as a car-only structure without adding bus lanes or a train line and more than $16 billion with them

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Coast Guard Keeps the Hudson Clear of Ice

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Hudson

By BRIAN THOMPSON of NBC New York

With another Deep Freeze settling into the Hudson River Valley, three Coast Guard cutters are expected to be working hard through the rest of the week trying to keep a navigation channel open from New York Harbor up to Albany.

It is a literal lifeline to upstate New York, allowing as many as 5 or 6 barges a day to head north to oil terminals in the Albany area.

“For us anything over a foot to 16 inches is pretty complicated for us to go through,” said Sernior Chief Bosuns Mate Michael Koch, skipper of the cutter Wire. The 65 foot vessel is the smallest of three the Coast Guard has been using on almost a daily basis to keep the Hudson open to the tug-barge combinations.

Other than a fleet of ice breakers that operate in the Great Lakes basin, the Hudson River is the only one in the nation that the Coast Guard operates ice breakers on a daily basis through each winter.

Hudson River Ice Was Once a Hot Commodity

Posted on January 19, 2011 by Hudson

By JAMES BREIG of The Troy Record

In the 21st century, two of the big harvests in New York State are of grapes and apples. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, however, ice was a big “crop” along the Hudson River.

The frozen water was harvested and placed into storage sheds for use in the summer, especially in New York City. Its growth through immigration had increased the demand for ice to refrigerate foods.

A measure of the size of the harvest can be found in the Jan. 28, 1879, issue of The New York Times in a story titled “Reaping the Ice Harvest: An Unusually Large Yield from the Hudson River.” The story estimated that three million tons of ice would be taken from the Hudson.

The harvesting had to be done north of New York City because the river there contained too much salt, which inhibited freezing. The shoreline between Poughkeepsie and Troy, on both sides of the river, was a key stretch for taking ice, work that was often done by farmers while their fields lay under snow.

The Times remarked that the ice being stored in 1879 was “thicker” and “of better quality” that previous harvests. Working on the frozen river were thousands of men — and even boys who handled teams of horses to transport the blocks of ice. Their pay ranged between one and two dollars a day.

At Schodack, the Knickerbocker Ice House employed nearly 250 workers to cut and store 65,000 tons of ice. There were ten storehouses in Stuyvesant, and more than 1,200 men kept them stocked with upwards of 132,000 tons of block ice.

Dredging the River, But What About the Champlain Canal?

Posted on April 5, 2010 by Hudson

By FRED LEBRUN in The Albany Times Union

Spring waters are gushing down the Hudson, so a curious man’s fancy turns naturally to thoughts of PCBs.

As expected, levels coming over the federal dam in Troy are spiking. Monitors set up by General Electric show 2,000 parts per trillion of polychlorinated biphenyls in the water, four times the allowable limit. Then again, with all the acknowledged resuspension activity that went on during the long summer of dredging last year up in the Fort Edward area, this comes as no surprise. In another year or two at the most, those spikes will likely plummet to within the acceptable as long as no new sources of PCBs are introduced upstream.

Ah, but there’s the rub. What if we have a six-year, or more likely a 10-year, project ahead, raising spikes year after year? How much resuspension is too much? And for how long? And what do we do about it?

Plus, for reasons that remain murky, the state never actively pushed for navigational dredging as part of the consent order signed by the EPA and GE, even though PCBs are the reason the channel is silted in from the Troy dam to Fort Edward.

By state regulation, the channel is supposed to be a minimum 12 feet deep to allow commercial tugs and barges to use the Champlain Canal, which along this stretch is actually the Hudson. In some places, the silt is so bad that the canal has only three feet of water, effectively blocking commercial traffic.

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General Electric’s Credibility Problem
PCBs and You - The Science Behind the Rhetoric

A Channel Runs Through It

Posted on July 27, 2009 by Hudson

From Waterford near Albany north to Whitehall and Lake Champlain, the Champlain Canal is often actually a channel within the banks of the Hudson River itself. And yes, this is as cool as it sounds.

The Champlain Canal, one of America’s first canals, opened up vital shipping routes along the Hudson River in upstate New York. An integral part of New York and American history, the Champlain Canal’s impact was substantial, increasing commerce and introducing relatively speedy travel from New York City north to Lake Champlain.

Take a tour of the Champlain Canal here

Take side trip to the Feeder Canal
Learn about other New York canals here

The Hudson River

from Mouth to Source

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