Portable Dredges Provide Flexibility For Southwind

While based along the Ohio River in Evansville, Ind., Southwind Construction’s portable dredges have taken on jobs big and small along the Eastern Seaboard for more than 20 years.

Recently, the firm was awarded a $6.5 million contract to re-establish channel navigation depths along the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway near Fernandina Beach, Fla. It involves dredging 553,000 cubic yards of shoaled sands and sediments from the waterway with placement along the Amelia Island State Park shoreline and within an upland placement impoundment, said Darrell Stewart, senior project manager.

The project is “mid-sized” for Southwind, which has successfully completed projects as large as $8.2 million in value and as little as less than $1 million, often for the Corps of Engineers but also for other government and private customers.

Contracts have included everything from dredging for the Department of Natural Resources and Coast Guard stations to marsh creation and shoreline protection in Texas and Louisiana, deepening of private marinas, lake dredging and golf course development in northern Indiana, and various channel navigation projects for the states of New York, Massachusetts, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and New Jersey, among others.

One recent job involved pumping 400,000 cubic yards of material for beach renourishment for a homeowners’ association on the East Coast.

The company now owns a fleet of six portable hydraulic cutter suction dredges ranging in size from 6 to 18 inches in diameter. Southwind Construction has become an industry leader in mobility, able to reach even remote locations quickly and efficiently. It owns all of its own equipment, including booster pumps, dredge tenders, backhoes, excavators and dozers to meet clients’ needs.

With all of this specialization, it may come as a surprise to many people that Southwind got into the dredging business “by accident,” Stewart said with a quick laugh.

Bill Koester formed Southwind as a civil sitework company in the late 1970s, but the company was approached by a local power utility out of western Kentucky to perform dredging of its fly ash ponds. Southwind pursued this opportunity by purchasing its first dredge from Ellicott. By the late 1990s, most of its work involved dredging.

Despite taking on jobs from Maine to Florida along the East Coast and along the entire Gulf Coast, the company’s core workforce of 11 remains based at the home office in Evansville. As necessary, depending on contract obligations, that workforce may swell to as many as 50 people, many of whom have worked for Southwind seasonally for years.

Stewart said the company has a reputation for providing quality work on time and within budget for its clients, many of whom are repeat customers.

“We take great pride in our ability to adhere to construction and environmental schedules while arriving to the jobsite on time and completing all work within the scheduled milestones governed by our contracts,” he said. “Proper maintenance of equipment to minimize downtime and experienced personnel to ensure budgeted production rates are achieved are all keys to the success of our operations.”

Fernandina Beach Project

The recently awarded Fernandina Beach project is not the first time Southwind has worked for the Jacksonville Engineer District or even on this stretch of the Atlantic Intracoastal Canal. Stewart said this segment of the canal often requires dredging every four to five years to maintain a channel depth of 12 to 14 feet. In fact, it is the third time since the 1990s that Southwind has been awarded the contract for dredging this segment. Southwind is scheduled to mobilize to the project site September 3, with the contract expected to take three to four months to complete.

The project time has been carefully scheduled, taking into consideration environmental factors such as the nesting seasons of protected species, including sea turtles, gopher tortoises and shorebirds such as least terns and piping plovers as well as certain species of snakes that inhabit the area and are protected by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and Wildlife Service.

“Our pipeline overland must be strategically routed to avoid sensitive areas, and our pumping operations are to be conducted in a manner to minimize impact to the surrounding environment,” Stewart said.

The original project start date was delayed for two months due to heavy nesting in the placement areas, but most turtle and bird hatchings have taken place by late August, he said.

The delay means much of the work is taking place during prime hurricane season, but Southwind has plenty of experience working in all types of weather conditions. However, the business is also safety-minded, with focus on extensive training, using highly experienced staff and crew and a written safety policy, as well as weekly toolbox safety meetings.

Other unique aspects of the job include sand placement along a state park shoreline for renourishment while pumping silts and organic matter into an upper placement site. All the sediments are screened so that anything three-quarters of an inch or larger is removed. This was specific to this project, Stewart said, as the dredge must screen for potential 50-caliber munitions left over from a former gunnery and bombing practice facility from the early 1940s.

As part of its commitment to environmental sustainability, Southwind looks for opportunities to beneficially reuse dredged materials, when possible.

Southwind business development manager Dan Thompson said the company has also performed several dewatering contracts using smaller dredges to pump through mechanical presses or geotubes, a process that is particularly useful in areas where there is difficulty securing permits or real estate for constructing upland placement areas.

“We are seeing the trend leaning more toward this type of work in the future,” Thompson said.

Additionally, Southwind has instituted a marketing campaign aimed at expanding its private sector efforts.

Thompson is excited about what the future holds, both for the dredging industry and Southwind in particular.

“With the growth that’s anticipated in the dredging industry, I think there’s a lot of opportunity for us, especially a company with our size and experience and the relationships we already have,” he said. “I think the sky’s going to be the limit for us.”

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Photo caption: A Southwind dredge pumps sand at Ocean Beach, N.C., at the fill placement area during a recent project. (Courtesy of Southwind Construction)