The Barge That Moved While We Were Under It

By Gus Marchetti, Salvage master. Reviewed by Amanda McCallister, editor.

Commercial Diving Contractors Alabama | Commercial Diving Contractors Alaska May 17, 2011. New Iberia, Louisiana. The water was coffee-brown from the week's rain, and we had a 140-foot deck barge sitting on the bottom of the Intracoastal Waterway at low tide. My two divers were under the starboard wing tank, swapping out a damaged keel cooler. The client, a local pipeline company, had told us the barge had been 'sitting on the bottom for a week, solid.' I should have checked the tide tables myself. I didn't. This is the story of how that barge moved, and how we got the divers out. It's not a heroic story. It's a story about complacency and the difference between a 'grounded' barge and a 'resting' barge. Anyone working on the water around tide should pay attention.

The Job That Looked Easy

We were contracted to replace two keel coolers on the starboard side. The barge was a flat deck, loaded with a small excavator and a pile of steel sheet piling. She was settled into the mud, and the dive supervisor, a kid named Ray, had set up air and comms. The visibility was less than a foot. The divers were working by feel. I remember the morning was still, and the current was barely moving. The only thing that didn't fit was that the mooring lines were slack—they'd been tied off to deadmen on the bank, and the barge had drifted a few feet out of position overnight. We pulled them up, called it a dawn surge, and went back to work.

The First Sign of Trouble

At 10:40, the diver on the port side, DeAndre, said he felt the barge 'shiver.' Not a continuous vibration, just a shake. I was on the deck, and I didn't feel anything. Ray asked if he wanted to come out. DeAndre said it was probably a boat wake. We'd seen a tow pass twenty minutes before. So we told him to keep working. That was my call. Ten minutes later, the stern line, which was a 1-inch nylon, popped out of the water like a bowstring. I looked at the bank and saw a deadman lean. That's when I knew we were not on the bottom anymore. The tide had turned, and the barge was refloating.

Why She Moved

What I didn't fully understand then is that a barge can sit on soft mud and still be partially afloat. The water seeps under the hull as the tide rises, and once the pumping force exceeds the mud's hold, she lifts. Then the current takes the hull sideways because the mooring lines are spread too wide. The excavator on deck shifted the center of gravity. The barge rotated maybe 15 degrees before the lines caught. But 15 degrees is enough to trap a diver under a bilge keel. We had no spuds on that barge, and the ground tackle was two anchors that were never heavy enough. The client said 'grounded' and we believed him. That's on us.

Getting the Divers Out

I signaled the divers by pulling their air hose twice—that means stop, come to the surface. DeAndre came up first, calm, asking why we pulled them. He said he felt the hull tilt slightly, but he thought it was the excavator moving. The other diver, a kid from Morgan City, came up with a bent fin from snagging on the hull edge. Nobody got hurt, but we came within a few inches of a real casualty. We tied off the barge to the bank with four lines, ran the engine to hold her against the bank, and waited for the next low tide. Then we re-positioned her with spuds and a proper anchor spread before sending anyone back down.

What Changed After That

I wrote a new job safety analysis for any submerged bottom work in tidal waters. The rule: if the water level can change by more than half a foot, the barge gets spuds. If it doesn't have spuds, we set a hydraulic anchor or move to a drydock. We also installed a simple depth gauge on the barge's keel—a marked rod that we could read from deck—so the supervisor could see the water rising under the hull. The diver's signal for 'I feel movement' is now a distinct double tap on the hull, and the dive tender has full authority to pull the team out without asking me. That was hard for me to give up, but it's the right call. You don't wait for confirmation when someone's life is under a steel deck.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can a barge be 'grounded' and still move? In soft mud, a barge can settle into a slight depression but still have water under parts of the hull. As the tide rises, the water pressure lifts the hull until it floats; the current then can swing it before the mooring lines load up. What are spuds and why do they help? Spuds are vertical steel piles that go through wells in the barge and into the seabed. They pin the barge in place so it can't drift when a tide or current shifts. They are the standard answer for working on the bottom in rivers and harbors. Why didn't you just send the divers out immediately when you noticed movement? We didn't recognize the movement for what it was. A single 'shiver' can be many things on a working barge. The lesson is to treat any unexplained movement as a real threat and to have a standing rule that the tender can abort the dive. That's what we do now.