Louisville District, Repair Fleet Partner On Infrastructure Maintenance
By Abby Korfhage
Louisville Engineer District
The Louisville Engineer District works in partnership with The Great Lakes and Ohio River Division’s Regional Rivers Repair Fleet, also known as R3F, on major maintenance and repair efforts for the district’s locks and dams on the Ohio and Green rivers and for the district’s 17 flood risk management dams across Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio.
“Louisville District’s partnership with the Regional Rivers Repair Fleet is vital to the reliability, resiliency and efficiency of the district’s navigation and flood risk management infrastructure,” said Shawn Kenney, the Louisville District Operations Division’s technical support branch chief. “Our goal is to ensure reliability of our system through proactive maintenance and repairs before deficiencies have operational impacts. With aging and deteriorating infrastructure and resource constraints, there is a trend toward a fix-as-fails maintenance strategy.”
The Louisville District and R3F have been working together for years to improve maintenance processes.
“R3F is the preferred resource provider for performing much of this major maintenance work on our infrastructure because the in-house capabilities provide seasoned expertise with the unique work and flexibility if differing site conditions are found once construction is in-progress,” Kenney said. “The adaptability of R3F provides an enhanced level of risk management that would not be possible if all major maintenance work was contracted out.”
Having the ability to mobilize in-house fleets improves resiliency, helping to restore infrastructure to service quickly in the event of an emergency, Kenney added.
R3F was formed in 2016 when individual river district repair fleets previously located in Louisville, Huntington, Pittsburgh and Nashville were consolidated. This standardized core work and fleet management, safety risk management, equipment maintenance, training and staffing.
Recently, the Heavy Capacity Fleet of the RF3 completed miter gate replacements at McAlpine Locks and Dam in Louisville, Ky., and Cannelton Locks and Dam in Cannelton, Ind., to increase reliability and efficiency on the inland waterways system. The Louisville District and R3F’s initiative consolidated this work from two seasons to one, minimizing the time the lock chambers had to be shut down and greatly reducing impacts to industry.
“Completing this dual miter gate changeout and floating mooring bitt replacements in one low-water season rather than two reduced industry impacts by over four months in 2022 and allowed for project cost savings of over $10 million,” said Waylon Humphrey, the Louisville District’s Operations Division chief. “Most importantly, now that Louisville and R3F have demonstrated this is possible at McAlpine, and repeatable at Cannelton, we have laid the groundwork for the miter gate replacement program timeline to be cut in half.”
The Louisville District and R3F are driving toward greater efficiencies with the fleets, Kenney said.
“The team is pushing the envelope on efficiency and proving successful through diligent planning, aggressive scheduling practices and proactive risk management,” he said, citing the McAlpine and Cannelton projects in 2020 and 2022, respectively, as prime examples.
These projects successfully reduced the timeframe from two five-month closures over two years to a single five-month closure and reduced the budget from $47 million to $37 million.
“These efficiencies allow USACE to move on to the next critical needs on the long list of backlogged maintenance,” Kenney said. “Also, the reduced closure times benefit the navigation industry and its customers to the tune of millions of dollars.”
The R3F team most recently worked with the Louisville District at John T. Myers Locks and Dam in Mt. Vernon, Ind., to rehab the miter gates in the 1,200-foot lock chamber. The project, which was originally estimated to require an 18-week closure, reopened November 9 after closing in mid-August.
