Mr. Robertson was lockmaster of No. 52 for five years. Because of the stress, he said, his doctor told him he needed to do something else if he wanted to live. When the job opened up, he was relieved to be transferred to No. 53, where the dam is down more and stress is lower.
Even drinking water is at the mercy of the locks. When the corps lowered No. 52’s pool to work on the dam on Sept. 14, Paducah’s intake pipes — which suck water directly out of the river — could have risen above water. If the closing had persisted for 96 hours, as was predicted, the town of 25,000 people would have had to find another source of water.
A few days later, Mr. Helland stood above the dam on a steel box that would protect his divers from the fierce current when they dived into the river to fix the wickets. The steam-powered maneuver boat lay against the dam, boiler hissing. The crane operator jiggled his foot on the pedals. Warm vapor rose from the roiling rapids below. On top of the dam, a milk crate, a dead fish, a bowling ball and hundreds of logs had come to rest. “Did you know bowling balls float?” asked Scott Davis, a lock operator.
Waiting on Progress
Earlier that week, it was starting to rain, and Mr. Davis and Sadie, his black dog, were leaving for the night. They walked past three retired wickets on the ground above the lock. The wood was gray, pockmarked and scoured from the river. “This is the best-made thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Mr. Davis, 52. “The wood is spectacular — it’s the heartwood of white oak trees.” He has been taking old wickets home, milling the wood, and making picture frames and coffee tables. “When somebody retires from here, I’m going to give them a picture of a sunset over the lock and a coffee table to put their feet on,” he said.
By the time the William Hank was cleared to enter No. 52’s lock, the captain had gone to bed, and the pilot, Jackson Walker (universally called Bubba), was in the pilot house. “I have actually sat on both sides of this lock for a week to a week and a half before,” he said. “That’s money these companies are having to pay these guys just to sit.” Slowly, the boat chugged toward the lock wall.
One thousand feet in front of him, on the head of the tow, a deckhand called over the radio telling him how close he was: “All right, Bubba, four more feet you be looking at daylight on that long wall … about a foot or two to the good.”
Mr. Walker maneuvered the William Hank into the 1,200-foot chamber, a temporary addition from 1969 that has long outlived its design life. Instead of a smooth wall, the chamber is made of poured concrete cylinders that almost seem designed to catch the front of a barge. “You can easily get quartered just enough that you can jam up in here and do a bunch of damage,” Mr. Walker said. His tow, like most, was 105 feet wide. The lock chamber is 110 feet wide. To park his 1,130-foot, 19,200-ton craft, he had as much space as a car does in a crowded parking lot.
Gently tapping the stainless steel levers that control the rudders and pulling back and forth on the two throttles, Mr. Walker steered, came ahead, and stopped in the center of the chamber. To his right, the bedraggled condition of the wickets was apparent. “It’s just like holding your fingers up against the water and letting it flow through,” he said. The William Hank had waited eight hours to get here. “This is one of the fastest I’ve seen it,” Mr. Walker said.
A man in a neon green vest rode a little yellow scooter to the end of the lock wall. He got out and leaned back on a long metal lever. The lock gate began to creak and groan. A big red gear turned, a black steel arm stretched out, and the gate slowly closed. No. 52 is operated entirely by hydraulics, and Mr. Helland said he could tell by the sound if something was wrong. The lock operator can move a tow through the chamber in an hour by himself, using the levers and a set of buttons inside two sheet metal shacks a little bigger than portable toilets.
At Olmsted, this will all be done with clicks of a mouse, but no matter how much money is invested in infrastructure by the Trump administration, Mr. Helland’s shoulders will feel the weight of 80 million tons for at least two more years.
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