Editorial By Bruce Karnick

[email protected]

I’ll admit it, there are some pretty cool aspects of being a reporter. The behind-the-scenes stuff at sports is one of them and getting to know the student athletes is probably the coolest aspect, but the inner child in me will admit, this is right up toward the top. I have always loved to see how things work. I can go down the rabbit hole big time on YouTube just watching “how things work” videos. Smarter every day is one of my favorite channels, right behind Colin Furze. Even guys like Mark Rober, former NASA engineer distract me for hours with the stuff they build. These guys build stuff at home just to see if they can and then they teach while they do it, so when I saw the gates were being replaced at Lock & Dam #2, I had to take my shot to see if I could get access to see the repair work up close.

George at the Army Corps of Engineers was kind enough to accept my request, but he may have made a mistake and forgot to tell me that I needed to be wearing steel toe boots and pants, not shorts, if I go on a tour. No biggie, George made it up to me by inviting me back on Tuesday to get up close and personal with the installation of the downstream gates.

So that’s the conundrum here, I am working on a cool piece that people can nerd out on, but it won’t make this week’s edition of the paper, of which I teased on our social media, so in good conscience, I need to give you SOMETHING in print, so I will simply tease you a little of what is to come.

The original lock and dam, located at mile 815.2 on the Mississippi River was started in 1928 and finished in 1930. Due to settling, the original lock walls began to tilt severely, so a second lock had to be built. That was completed in 1948 and is the general layout you see today. The site did go under a major rehabilitation project over an eight-year period back in 1987 to 1995.

The dam is 722 feet long with 19 Tainter gates that are each 30 feet long. (Tainter gates are a radial arm flood gate.) The dam also has a 4.4-megawatt power station that is owned and operated by the city of Hastings. 4.4-megawatts is roughly enough to power between 3,300 and 4,400 homes in Hastings per year.

The work on the gates began in 2015. They had to measure and engineer the new gates, a process the took a few years to complete. Then those gates had to be shipped from the manufacturing location, Alabama, to the river. Once on the river, they were worked on more to get the hydraulic hoses and all sorts of other control items hooked up. That took place south of Hastings by several hundreds of miles. The massive crane, capable of lifting the gates had to be put on to a barge and the balancing act had to be figured out. It is a long process involving hundreds of people much smarter than I am. Just listening to the guys talk about it made me feel a little smarter when I left the room. No worries, that feeling left very quickly.

So, here’s the deal, Tuesday morning, I will have had a chance to see all sorts of behind-the-scenes stuff. Views that not everyone gets to see, and I cannot wait to share them with you, our readers. I will be taking a lot of pictures and plan on a full page of those to accompany the story. I might take so many that once the story is published, I may have to do a photo dump to our Facebook page to let you see them all.

Since it is already after Tuesday morning’s tour, I am super excited to share me ‘geeking out’ at the dam and I hope you geek out a little too, it’s just going to have to wait until next week.

The two massive doors on the left are 27 feet tall and weight over 1,300 tons each. These doors are the original doors built in the 1948 addition. The new door, on the right is expected to last at least as long with proper maintenance. Photo by Bruce Karnick

The technology that goes into cranes to keep them upright on land is already impressive. The fact that a crane this big stays upright on water should blow your mind. A complex azimuth and ballast system controlled by computer and engineers work hand in hand with the crane operator and the load the crane is lifting to adjust the balance of the barge to keep it upright and mostly level. Photo by Bruce Karnick