UPDATED: 'It's a beast': Corps dredge Jadwin returns to area

By BILL DECKER
bdecker@daily-review.com
The Jadwin, a massive dredge built before World War II, is still at work today. And this week, it’s working in Berwick Bay.
“It may be old,” Port of Morgan City Executive Director Raymond “Mac” Wade said, “but it’s a beast.”
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ 50-foot dustpan dredge, based in Vicksburg, Mississippi, can accommodate a crew of 50. It will work north of the Morgan City-Berwick bridges because it’s too big to move beneath them.
The Jadwin was busy Thursday scooping and moving sediment near the businesses outside the flood wall on the Morgan City side.
The dredge will also touch up the river channel north of the bridges and then move north of Berwick to dredge the area around Stouts Pass.
Wade asked the Corps to add a few tasks to the Jadwin’s list of things to do on this trip because this is likely to be the last dredging in that area until September.
“It was very kind of them to do that,” Wade said.
The cost for the dredging here is about $90,000 a day, which will be paid from federal funds for maintaining the area’s waterways.
The work at Stouts Pass may be especially welcome.
At the April 12 Port of Morgan City board meeting, the Coast Guard reported that of the previous 36 incidents it investigated, 21 involved vessels that were grounded. Fifteen of those happened in the Stouts Pass area.
The Jadwin is named for Lt. Gen. Edgar Jadwin, the Spanish-American war veteran who pushed the federal plan for Mississippi River flood control after the great flood of 1927.
Wade noted that the Jadwin is old enough to have been constructed with rivets rather than welds. But it has been updated and can handle big dredging jobs.
During the 2019 season, the Jadwin dredged more than 4 million cubic yards of sand and sediment, the Corps reported.
Crew members live and work on board the dredge and its accompanying vessels throughout their deployment, which lasted more than 120 days that year, the Corps said.
“I love my job and the camaraderie we have on this ship,” Jadwin Capt. Chuck Ashley said in a 2019 Corps press release.
“After this long of a season, it gets pretty tough. It feels great to have accomplished another season and to be headed home.”
The season typically runs from May to October or November.
The 2020 season got tougher when the Jadwin collided with a tow nine miles from Morgan City and had to go to a local shipyard for repair.
After the Jadwin completes its work here, the Port of Morgan City is expecting another dredging project to begin in June, Wade said.
A Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Co. dredge, possibly either the Alaska or the Carolina, will clear sediment between Crewboat Cut and Eugene Island.
The Brice Civil Constructors dredge continues its work between Eugene Island and the sea buoy.
The dredge was built specifically to remove sticky “fluff” mud from the bar channel. That project, funded through the Corps of Engineers, has cost $14 million so far.