It’s a never-ending cycle of beacons and buoys
Coast Guard repair crews keep the Ship Channel and environs open for business by tackling a mucky job
Noah Collom grasped the rope attached to a piling and leaned back, using every muscle in his body to keep the post straight as 6,000 pounds of force hammered it into the muddy bottom.
He was replacing a marker that had delineated the precise point at which the safe, well-maintained waterway becomes a shallow, mucky hazard for barges and other vessels. It had likely been hit by passing ships or wiggled loose from the daily onslaught of wind and current. The Houston Ship Channel and its tributaries have a higher knock-down rate than any other U.S. waterway. Between 400 and 600 channel markers are replaced each year, some of them numerous times.
That workload keeps 20-year-old Collom busy. Just five months out of the U.S. Coast Guard’s boot camp, he’s a new member on the 75-foot cutter Clamp and its team tasked with maintaining lights, day beacons, buoys and ranges that keep the waterway navigable and the economy flowing.
“In two years, I’ve never really cleared my work list,” said Henry Myers, the Coast Guard’s officer in charge for the Clamp and the 68-foot barge it pushes.
It’s an exhausting and detail-oriented job, starting at the bridge. Myers must steer the bow of the vessel within 3 feet of where the piling is to be planted. Watching the vessel’s position on a monitor, he factors in the depth of the water and the speed at which the spuds — three metal shafts used to anchor the vessel —
“If you didn’t have the aids to navigation, it would be extremely dangerous for ships to navigate Galveston Bay. And they wouldn’t.” Retired Coast Guard Capt. Mike Cunningham
can be lowered before giving the command.
“Drop ’em,” he tells the crew members on the barge deck. “Sink ’em, secure and build it center.”
Cedar Bayou is too shallow for the 50- and 60-foot poles lining the deck, so the crew uses a chain saw to cut them to length. The piling is then connected to a crane, which gradually lifts the pole and connects it to a pile driver. The singlepiston diesel engine will initially use gravity to push the pole into the water. Once there’s resistance, it begins hammering.
These jobs are cranked out in 20 to 45 minutes, with crews capable of building 10 to 12 in a single day. Larger projects can take eight hours as the crew builds complex range towers with decks that are 12 to 16 feet wide. Pilots will use these range towers to stay in the central, deeper part of the waterway.
The placement of the tower’s light has just 3 inches of wiggle room or else ships could be hundreds of feet off from the center of the channel. Pilots guiding vessels will see the ranges from hundreds of feet or even miles down the channel.
“Where they get most of their information is looking out the window,” said JJ Plunkett, a retired Coast Guard captain who works with the Houston Pilots on some of their landside tasks, including communicating with the Coast Guard.
Despite having differential GPS and the ability for ship computers to communicate with one another, pilots still rely heavily on visual cues, Plunkett said
Capt. Mark Mitchem, presiding officer of the Houston Pilots, likened it to driving a car and looking at the GPS instead of out the front window. The GPS on vessels can pinpoint a ship within 3 feet of its antenna’s actual position, but pilots still feel more comfortable and safe looking out the windshield instead of relying blindly on technology.
“We couldn’t move the big ships that we’re moving now,” Plunkett said. “We couldn’t move 21stcentury ships without the 18th-century technology like buoys and ranges.”
The Ship Channel and surrounding waterways have more than 600 buoys or pilings with lights or signs, and it has 96 of the more complex range structures.
Take away the tributaries, and there are roughly $2.5 million worth of channel markers in the Houston Ship Channel itself. Crews on vessels like the Clamp replace roughly $100,000 worth of markers every year.
This is essential for the breadth of industry that calls on the Port of Houston, which handles more foreign tonnage than any other U.S. port.
“If you didn’t have the aids to navigation, it would be extremely dangerous for ships to navigate Galveston Bay,” said retired Coast Guard Capt. Mike Cunningham, director of program management at the Greater Houston Port Bureau. “And they wouldn’t.”
He likened these channel markers to lanes painted on a highway or lights along an airport runway.
Myers said he fell in love with this job on a sunny day. He was on the bridge, with the windows open, country music playing and the faint smell of diesel wafting in.
He joined the Coast Guard in 1996, attracted by the guns, helicopter rescues and drug interdictions. He did many of those things and kept track of the people he saved and the drugs he stopped. But on the Houston Ship Channel, he realized the economic benefit of his work was too large to count.
“We’re marking this channel to create all this industry,” he said.
Their work is especially important after hurricanes, when ship captains are eager to get back into port and restart the economic engine. Myers was on duty for 43 days after hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005.
Hurricane Harvey brought more flooding than wind, but there were still channel markers to replace. Myers rode out the storm at the Manchester Terminal in Sims Bayou, watching as a love seat, a child’s plastic playground and a portable toilet floated by. His construction tender worked with another cutter and a few smaller boats to build 200 aids to navigation within six days.
The hurricane prep and recovery lasted 2½ weeks, working from sunup to sundown.
A typical stint aboard the Clamp lasts three or four days. Crew members get a few days off when the cutter returns to port, and then they work landside to load the vessel with supplies and make any needed repairs.
“Fixing what we break when we’re out here,” Myers said.
Much of the Coast Guard Aids to Navigation fleet was built in the 1960s and ’70s. These “black hull” vessels — the Coast Guard’s way of identifying a vessel and its purpose, with white hulls being law enforcement vessels and red hulls being icebreakers — are due to be replaced in the coming years.
Until then, Myers’ crew will continue working the waterway from the cutter Clamp. On the sunny April day in Cedar Bayou, Collom replaced 11 pilings with lights and day beacons. He was covered in mud by lunchtime.
Collom hadn’t known about this Coast Guard mission before being assigned to the Clamp. While he ultimately wants to work on the electrical components of helicopters, he’s getting the hang of his construction role and taking pride in his work on the waterway.
“It is very eventful,” he said. “Always on the move.”