Sidebar: SHAKE, RATTLE AND ROLL, November 2003

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SHAKE, RATTLE, AND ROLL

Dredging may look like easy work, since it's the equipment that does all the heavy lifting. A visit out to the dredge New York with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers quickly changed my mind. Operating a dredge takes a lot of concentration in addition to a strong constitution.

The dredge, which was digging up rock in the Kill Van Kull near the Bayonne Bridge, is a huge, noisy, behemoth of a machine, with "Liebherr" printed across its back, the name of a company known for massive machines. The dredge operator sits in relative comfort in an air-conditioned cabin, about 30 feet up from the deck of the ship. Relative comfort is the operative term here, because although it's quieter in the cabin than anywhere else on the dredge, the vibrations up there are fierce. I hung onto a cabinet bolted to the wall, lest I be tossed way down to the greasy deck below.

The dredge operator works a marathon 12-hour shift up in the cabin, leaving only for a lunch break. He operates the dredge via a joystick, like the one kids use to navigate through a video game. And, like a video game, all the real action in the dredge operator's cabin is visible on-screen. In this case, it's a series of small video screens that use GPS-tracking to show the operator exactly where he's digging, where he's finished digging, and how deep he's going. It's hard to believe that such precision can survive in the face of such fierce vibrations.

—Gayle Ehrenman

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