Veit Gets Outstanding Performance With DSC Moray Class Dredges
Veit & Company Inc. a specialty contracting and waste-management company based in Rogers Minnesota started a dredging group in 2012 through the acquisition of Adventure Divers Inc. (ADI Marine).
ADI Marine’s jobs include dredging flyash ponds restricted waste ponds reclamation and recycling ponds lime sludge cells spray basins and oil refinery waste ponds. Veit serves industrial municipal and general contractor clients in the upper Midwest and select locations in the southern U.S.
ADI brought two eight-inch DSC Moray swinging-ladder dredges to the Viet equipment inventory. It acquired the first one in 2008 which was so successful that it bought a second Moray the following year.
“First and foremost the cost fit our budget” Aaron Faken executive field operations manager said. “We needed a dredge that could access the tight areas we work in provide the type of agitating cutterhead we need to cut particular types of soil be mobile enough to be singletruck transportable and meet our production needs.”
The second Moray features a closed-loop hydraulically driven underwater pump assembly power up/down winches with API-rated drums for proper cable storage a PLC-based (Programmable Logic Controller) operating system and a stern kicking spud for dredge advancement and positioning. Digging depths range from three feet to 17 feet six inches. The swing width of the swinging ladder ranges from 13 feet to 19 feet four inches.
During its first year of operation the company’s first Moray dredge saw just under 3000 hours of operation. “That is a tremendous amount of hours in one year” Faken said. In that time there were no major breakdowns and nothing other than small wear items and small components.”
“We worked with [DSC] to put together a list of contact numbers in case we needed to get ahold of someone after hours and they answered the phone whenever we called” Faken said.
The two Morays average half a dozen or so dredging projects each year and Veit expects to use them on seven or eight projects this year. A few examples of dredging applications using the company’s Moray dredges include:
A close-up of the Moray’s swinging ladder
Channel Excavation Project
At a recent channel excavation project at a lake in Bismarck North Dakota Faken said “We were pumping sand through a 10-inch poly pipeline with a 9.4- or 9.5-inch inside diameter. We maintained a production rate of about 55 or 56 yards per hour of sand through 5500 feet of pipe without a booster pump. Our record has actually been 7400 feet of 10-inch pipeline with no booster pump. This project’s pipeline had about a 25-foot rise of elevation at the end of the line and we still maintained 2700 gallons per minute of flow as measured by inline flow meters. And that wasn’t from surges it was a maintained rate. The performance of the Moray’s pump saved us the expense of a booster pump which would have caused an increase in what we were charging the client of two or more dollars per yard for the excavated material.”
Sewage Lagoon Remediation
At a job site in North Dakota Veit completed remediation of a small city sewage lagoon pond sooner than expected. This type of pond does not require remediation very often but some can produce as much as 20000 pounds of material most of which is water. The job involved dredging material from the bottom of the pond and placing it into geobags where the material was treated with a polymer and allowed to sit until the water drained out of the bag. The water that drained off was returned to the pond. The dewatered geobags were then cut open and the material trucked to a dump site. Veit bid this job based on the daily production rate it expected to get from the Moray. Once the dredge was placed in the water however it pumped twice as much material as the company expected. This actually created the dilemma of having to treat twice as much sewage as expected at one time so the company doubled up on the chemical doses. The job finished two weeks ahead of schedule providing a significant cost savings for the company.
Tapering a Barge Terminal Channel
At a job along the coast of Texas Veit was hired by another dredging company to taper the sides of a barge terminal channel. The other dredging company had won the bid from a major oil company before realizing that the job required tapering the sides of the channel to prevent the shoreline from caving in. The other company’s dredge had a horizontal cutterhead that could not do this. Veit was hired to bring in one of its Morays which can change depth as it swings allowing it to taper the shoreline. The center of the channel had to be 20 feet wide with a 4-to-1 slope along the shoreline. Once the work began the dredge had to be moved twice a day to allow barge traffic to pass through the channel which took an hour out of the work day each time but the dredging could take place without affecting regular barge traffic in the channel.
Veit is considering adding another DSC dredge in the future. “We are looking at adding a larger dredge to the fleet” Faken said. “It will probably be a 10-inch or 12-inch dredge. We want one with larger capacity that will do the work of two Morays for larger projects—maybe a Barracuda Class dredge from DSC.”
About the Author: Charles Johnson is the director of sales for DSC Dredge LLC which is based in Reserve Louisiana. He can be reached at 630-574-3017 or via email at chjohnson@dscdredge.com.
