Chemical Barges News

It is truly no accident that Delgado Maritime & Industrial Training Center and Florida Marine Transport collaborate so closely.Zero incidents, zero injuries and eliminating critical barge and equipment failures doesn’t just happen by osmosis. It’s a result of continual safety training that breeds operational awareness and confidence to anticipate a difficult situation on an inland waterway before it actually occurs.With a high school education, Capt. Shelden Detrafford started out making $25/day in the 1960s.

In September of 2006, Dominique Smith of the then one tug company Tradewinds Towing came to Laborde Products, to look at the S12R engine for the repower of the Miss Lis, an Alaskan built low profile tug he planned on repowering. Later that same month, the deal was made, and shortly thereafter, the Miss Lis set sail with new Mitsubishi engines and Reintjes transmissions supplied by Laborde Products. Since then, the engines have logged over 30,000 hours travelling throughout North, Central and South America.

Senesco Marine Shipyard on the U.S. northeast coast has invested in a more productive and efficient welding system, concluding a deal with Pemamek to deliver a PEMA Welding Portal for the welding of double bottoms and subassemblies. Senesco Marine, a Reinauer Transportation Company, is a shipyard for new construction and vessel repair in the Northeast, consisting of 26 acres of Narragansett Bay waterfront property. To further boost its fabrication capability, Senesco trusted in PEMA’s welding automation technology and made a deal of a twin robot welding gantry.

Along the way, ATBs gain speed, efficiency, safety – and popularity. Operators of articulated tugs and barges, or ATBs, say they like the maneuverability, weather reliability, stability, speed of these units, and the manner in which the tug pushes the barge. As a marine transportation concept, they can also simply be described as versatile. ATBs move petroleum, chemicals, coal, grain, containerized cargo and rail cars for customers on the U.S. coasts, rivers, the Great Lakes and overseas. As a result, demand for articulated units expanded in the last two decades with new technology.

I read with great dismay, the article that appeared in your magazine’s February 2013 issue, entitled “THE ARTICULATED TUG BARGE (ATB) QUANDRY”. noun, plural quandaries : a state of perplexity or uncertainty, especially as to what to do; dilemma. There is no dilemma involving AT/B’s present in the coastwise or ocean transportation marketplace. AT/B’s are indeed increasingly supplanting ships in the Jones Act coastal trade. It is a trend that is slowly beginning to spread to coastwise transport in other regions of the world as well.

Running a ship repair business in the U.S. is anything but simple, with the unexpected being the norm and a cavalcade of new regulations. But Richard Bludworth has a penchant for turning the difficult simple. A staple in the Gulf of Mexico,  Bludworth Marine LLC was founded by Richard Bludworth in 1998, strictly as a topside repair facility. Today the Bludworth Marine  reach stretches to four waterfront facilities  on the 103 mile run between Orange to Galveston, TX, with its HQ in Houston.

The year was 1895. Grover Cleveland was in the second of his two nonconsecutive terms as President of the United States. In Mobile, Ala. a new shipyard opened at the ft. of Palmetto Street, named Harrison Brothers Dry Dock& Repair Yard, Inc. About 1915, it moved across the Mobile River to Blakely Island and they have been located there ever since. In 1958, the company opened a second shipyard about a mile south of the original location. Today the original facility is known as the Upper Yard and handles brown water repair and the Lower Yard is for blue water projects, although crossover projects do occur. Recently a 100-ft. barge came in for repair and the dry dock at the upper or brown water yard was not available to handle it, so the Lower Yard did the repair.

There's hardly a marine application — onboard or ashore — where seawater pumps are not considered critical to a vessel's operation or purpose. The ability to pump seawater aboard most vessels represents only a part of their liquid pumping requirements; in many cases other liquids such as caustics, corrosives, and alkalis need to be transferred, either from ship to shore or vice versa. For these kinds of harsh applications many shipboard pumps are constructed of metals designed to withstand the continuous flow of severely corrosive liquids. Typically, these metals include Monel and K-Monel, titanium, nickel bronze, alloy 20 steel, and 316 stainless steel.

On May 2, 2003, the USCG published two Temporary Final Rules establishing Regulated Navigation Areas (RNAs) in the Federal Register governing the movement (by barge) of Certain Dangerous Cargoes (CDCs) upon the inland rivers of the Eighth Coast Guard District and the Illinois Waterway System in the Ninth Coast Guard District. The rules will apply from April 16, 2003, until October 31, 2003. Any movement of CDCs by barge within the waters specified must be reported to the Inland River Vessel Movement Center (IRVMC) by telephone, fax, or e-mail. The USCG indicates that no Notice of Proposed Rulemaking was published as this notice falls under the exemption to the Administrative Procedures Act contained in the Maritime Transportation Security Act (MTSA) of 2002.

Back in 1992, when Manny Cheramie was first diagnosed in bad health, he decided to sell his 13-boat fleet of towboats. Still only in his forties, it was a real blow to Manny to leave the intercostal waters of Louisiana and Texas that had been his life since his dad introduced him to decking on a shrimp boat at five years of age. Now, after six years, Manny is getting a clean bill of health from his doctors. He and his wife Sonia, are preparing for a comeback with the launch of the first new boat of the second half of their lives. Lady Sonia is a 60 x 24-ft. 62 x 57-in. prop. "I have a lifetime contract for the new boat with Hollywood Marine," says Manny, who has been associated with the Houston based firm for 25 years.