Sea Control - Sea Control 319 - Dredging Up the Past with Megan Milliken Biven

Episode Date: February 17, 2022

Links1. "Dredging Up the Past," by Megan Milliken Biven, Current Affairs, May 25, 2020.

Hey folks, Shared here. Today my guest is Megan Millican-Biven, and we'll be discussing the National Dredging Fleet. This episode was edited and produced by Alexei Bualagi. We are still looking for audio editors to add to our team. So if you're interested, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find us on email at ccontrol at simsec.org with your resume. I do want to highlight a couple developments over at the main website. In the last two months, we've launched the Flotilla, SimSec's warfighting society focused on naval tactics. And just this last week, we launched our Naval Wargaming Discord. You can find more information at SimSec.org. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, The Bilge Pumps.

You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimbersman. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Hello, shipmates, and welcome back to Board Seat Control. Today, my guest is Megan Milliken-Bivin, and we're going to be talking about the National Dredging Fleet. So, Megan, welcome. Thank you for joining us. Could you tell the audience a little bit about your background, please? Well, hello, folks. Yes, so my background is previously I worked for the federal government. I worked for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, regulating offshore oil and gas and offshore wind.

and also the Marine Minerals Program, which oversees dredging and access to sand in the federal waters, the Outer Continental Shelf. And that's how I came to the topic of dredges, which I'll go into more. Absolutely. And thanks. And as a reminder to our listeners, all opinions express our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. So, yeah, again, how did you get interested in the topic of dredgers? Okay. Well, I'm from Louisiana. I'm from New Orleans specifically. And Louisiana is a delta. It was built by the mighty Mississippi River. And it is very shallow, very unconsolidated. And about a century ago, we discovered oil and gas. And we also closed in the Mississippi River. And Louisiana started sinking and sinking and sinking and eroding into the Gulf of Mexico. so we have lost what like a football field of land every 30 minutes is a metric commonly used and we are sinking into the sea if you look at a map from 100 years ago to a map today like

Louisiana is no longer shaped like a boot so shortly after Hurricane Katrina I became very much so obsessed with the topic of coastal restoration and it is mostly the way how I wound up to the agency that I wound up working for MMS the week I was hired BOEM when I left it after Deepwater Horizon. And so dredging is a necessary tool to restore coastal plains, coastal habitats like Louisiana. It is where a boat goes out into sandy shoals, digs up the sand, and brings it back from deposits onto the coast where you can plant mangroves, cypress, and other plants to kind of lock in the land and create the necessary speed bumps a coastal area like Louisiana needs to survive hurricanes and coastal storms. So that's how I came to it.

And you gave a presentation back in 2014 comparing the Louisiana coast to the Netherlands. So why did you opt for that comparison? Well, it all came because, as I mentioned earlier, the Marine Minerals Program in BOEM, you know, it oversees access to the sand in the OCS. And I was asked to review one of those applications from the state of Louisiana. And in it, it talks about how it was too expensive to access a hopper dredge for the state of Louisiana. So we needed to use a cutter suction dredge. And I became intrigued. So I was like, well, why is it too expensive?

And that's how I kind of fell down the rabbit hole of what are these vessels? And I became interested in the Netherlands because it, too, is a delta that is sinking into the North Sea. It was created by the Rhine and used in the Schmelz. I can't remember. You probably remember. And so it seems like an appropriate analog to Louisiana. And it certainly was. It had similar history. And indeed, when it first came after the 1954 flood, I believe, in Holland, there was a massive inundation. You know, thousands of cattle was lost. People died. It's a very traumatic event to people who are older than a certain age. And people, excuse me, the Netherlands committed to a certain coastline. We are not going to cede to the North Sea. We are going to commit to this coastline.

and because of that they committed to a dredge fleet it is private um but a certain private public partnership to ensure that they would always be able to maintain that um coastline and they also even flew in engineers from louisiana because at that point you know the united states had a pretty uh as we'll get into pretty large public dredge fleet and expertise in the field. So that's why I originally zeroed in on the Netherlands. And how the Louisiana example for land management compared to the Dutch? Louisiana has just not managed its coast. It's just allowed oil companies to drill and to leave orphaned wells in their wake and dredge for pipelines. I mean, if you look at an overhead, like I implored the audience to Google a map of

Louisiana, it's just like a snake's nest of pipelines that have been cut into the marshes and have allowed saltwater to come in and destroy the freshwater marshes and bayous and swamps. And it's, yeah, there's been no management in Louisiana. And it wasn't until Katrina where, you know, the full extent of what has happened, that people started to have larger conversations about restoring the coast. And there has been the State Master Plan, which commits to building the coast through a mix of dredge projects. and river diversion projects where they punch holes in the river and allow it to inundate the marshes and bring, if they can, you know, suspended sediment. But the problem is, is that

the Mississippi River and all the tributaries that feed into it, there's 50,000 locks and dams holding in sediment that are no longer available to nourish and build Louisiana's coast. So that is a tool that we cannot exclusively rely upon anymore. And there is also evidence and concern that because of all the nitrates and phosphates from industrial farming that are coming in, will actually do more damage as diversion projects. And that could actually just make shallower land with, you know, shallower, excuse me, root systems that'll just roll up like a carpet when a storm comes in. Yeah, we can't just rely on that. We want nature-based solutions. We want to live with nature as the Dutch are doing right now, but we also need to use the sand that's

available to us in the Gulf and on the East Coast and on the West Coast to build those various beaches and ensure that coastal communities are not vulnerable to coastal inundation where we can. I don't want to go off too much on a rant. I always do. That's okay. Rants authorized, encouraged even. But we'll shift gears a little bit now and talk about some of the history of dredging in the United States. What was the legislative history of domestic dredging? Oh, that's a big one. I'm like, I'm going to pull up the old paper I sent you just to reference. So legislative history, it all starts in New York when some enterprising business people and community members looked at the Atlantic and said, you know, we need to

develop this area. We need to be a force to reckon with. And we need to deepen the approaches into new york harbor because these are bigger and bigger boats coming in and we need to make sure that america is competitive to deal with that and that is in the late 1800s and you know i poured through old u.s army corps of engineers engineering reports back and forth with congress reporting where they tried to use private contractors and i think it was like first in the 1880s there was an attempt to dredge it to a certain depth and i think they went through four different contractors before they achieved the wanted goal. And then it was in 1899

where they went through two contractors and eventually they just decided it would be better if the Corps, and cheaper and easier, if the Corps built its own vessels to scope, to spec, to suit the needs, what they needed to do for the project. And then they could retain those vessels for future use. And it was so successful.

They did it so well that the legislation that was passed afterwards, I have to look it up, committed to a public dredge fleet. And that legislation is about 1907. I can't remember the exact legislation, but we committed to a public dredge fleet. And after that, we became a fixed administrative principle of the court to keep private bids down and own public dredge boats from there and out. And I think between what years, 1899 and 1949, the United States built 150 dredges of various type and purpose and they were deployed in the gulf on the east coast the great lakes and pacific to you know keep rivers navigable and to keep the you know the ports

deep enough for the newer generation of vessels so that's like the modern legislative history it does predate that we could go into how you know after the american uh revolution one of the earliest purposes of government was to keep our inland waterways safe for passage because as I wrote earlier you know rivers the the bars of the rivers would collapse and you know shoals so the boats couldn't pass trees would get pulled in and create snags and pull boats down and be really dangerous and treacherous for commerce going down the Mississippi River and all the rivers throughout the United States and so one of the earliest things they did was create these things called Uncle Tom's Toothpillers, yeah, where they would go in and move those snags to

ensure safe passage. And it was settled through a Supreme Court case that this was going to be, you know, a fixed duty of the federal government. It was not going to be for the states to do. It was not going to be for private industry to do. It was going to be a public service and good that the United States provided to its people and to the businesses. So that's the earlier. I kind of did like a time warp thing. And so let's go back to 1950. We've at this point, we have a very robust public dredge fleet. It's after the war, the Corps, you know, did work, obviously, on the western and eastern fronts, and was very, you know, vital and ensuring safe passage for goods and troops. And now all of these private interests are looking for ways to make money in the peacetime.

And that enters our next era of public dredging and private dredging. I was going to ask how big was the dredging fleet at the start of the 20th century? It basically sprung up from very little in 1899 to what, an initial four boats and then grew over the course of the next 50 years? Yeah, so two boats. And, you know, the Secretary of War in 1908 established a marine division in the office of the Chief of Engineers in D.C. so an entire like naval arc marine engineering office to create these new designs they were

i think the hopper dredge was first created by the american government and i think that's something to be really proud of because now that's a vessel that is used everywhere and that was because of this and they went from having two vessels to i forget the amount but you know between that period between 1899 and 1949 the corps built 150 dredge boats and i'm not sure they were all hopper but i I mean, that's a significant fleet to commit to in that period of time. And now we're going to get to what the fleet is today and why that is. Yeah. What sort of difficulties did the Corps of Engineers run into with its dredge fleet then, starting in the sort of the 1950s, really? Well, it was a coordinated private campaign to hold that the routine funding to update and build those boats hostage.

So there were there's two main private dredge firms. There's Great Lakes Dredge and Dock, who was out of Chicago. But Great Lakes Dredge and Dock was certainly like the most pivotal player in this saga. And they had very key members in Congress that they were able to influence and say, you know what, hold that funding hostage, make the Corps do like what it can. and you have to consider, you have to commission a report considering the use of private dredges exclusively. Yeah, they were basically holding the money hostage for several years. And this was a time when capital expenditures for port deepening and everything else was really dwindling. And so the ports were desperate, even like the workers on the private dredges, because there wasn't exclusively public dredging. There was still room for private bidders to bid and participate in the public dredging market because that's something to remember is that dredging by

and large is a government procured activity it is a government activity you don't have like aside from you know a beach on malibu you know where they want more beach put on in front of their house dredging tends to be just a government done activity you don't have you know just you and me going out there and saying we want to deepen the port and wherever this is a government thing And so if there was room for private bidders to participate in that quote unquote market, certainly the government allowed that if those bids were competitive with the government's own prices. In the 1960s, the big private player, the Great Lakes Dredge and Dock, held that money

hostage. And so the core, the leadership in the core was starting to listen to the gospel of privatization and says, OK, well, fine, we haven't had access to this money in 10 years. We haven't been able to fulfill our mission. perhaps if we do you know use private vessels we'll be able to do what we need to do and so that is when they ceased being the army corps of engineers and became the army corps of contract officer representatives instead and just you know oversaw private contracts and that was hr 7744 so it's the minimum fleet legislation public law 95-269 and it directed the corps to utilize its

own fleet only when a private bid exceeded the government bid by 25 percent. It's a pretty good cut. So it's saying the core. So imagine, if you will, you're in the Navy and you cannot use your own vessel. You have to use Blackwater, whomever's vessel, unless their bid to not use the Navy's vessel exceeded that by 25 percent. That is literally the bargain that Congress put into law. And so that's what happened. So what did that mean? That meant all of these vessels that were previously used and crewed full time by public employees had to be decommissioned and a skeleton fleet remained. We'll go into what happens next. So private industry made good and said, OK, fine, if you just choose us, if you say only us can do this, then we will build a big modern public dredge fleet. excuse me, private dredge fleet. And indeed they did. In that period of time, they built 14 new vessels, but they haven't really built anything since. And during that time, there was a bid

rigging conspiracy, you know, and, you know, now there's five firms, basically four firms that own this very small skeleton fleet. And any, I don't know if you're familiar with the idea of bid rigging, but it is a practice that is very common and is one of those like known secrets that this is a cartel that there are annual conventions where they talk about who's going to bid on what and when and what they're going to bid and you kind of can see it play out in their bidding activity it's like oh like it's weeks marine it's great lake stretch and dog oh wait they get it you know it's almost like it's very synchronized and they're going to deny that of course but it's hard to ignore the data and so there were several rounds of legislation that further restricted the

course access to its own fleet and there's just a few vessels now i think there's about four vessels. There's one on the West coast. There's one in the New Orleans, the Wheeler, which I'm very well familiar with. I think my grandfather worked at a shipyard, Avondale shipyard. He was a electrician. And I think he's been passed away for a very long time. And I think that he helped build that boat, which tells you how old that boat is, that we still have an active reserve status. And these boats, they sit there idle and they have crews. They have a skeleton crew just sitting there to keep it in ready reserve status and we spend about 25 million a year keeping these boats just ready and to be you know used so several pieces of legislation passed in the 1990s um

that said okay the wheeler is going to be put into ready reserve status they only can operate for 55 workdays a year um this boat the aseans is going to be only for 85 days a year the mcfarland 85 days a year and then the origins of all these pieces of legislation because there's always a rider on a bigger bill, like an omnibus bill, you know, be the Water Resources Development Act, the Oceans Act. And then all of these senators that helped originate these pieces of legislation would go on to work for Great Lakes Dredge and Dock as lobbyists. So it was very much the explicit intent and purpose to cripple the Corps' access to its own fleet and to benefit, you know, two firms. And I can name these senators. They're all dead now, probably. It was John Myers,

Tom Bevel and H.L. Callahan. And they would all go work for Dawson and Associates lobbying for Great Lakes Dredge and Dock. So yeah, that's where we are today. So we have the McFarland, the Wheeler, the Estions, and the Yakina. And they're all very old. And they have been actually used fairly recently because there's been a need for emergency port deeming a few times. And so that tells you that private capacity is not sufficient and that the grand privatization experiment has pretty much failed. You cited the examples of China and the EU as entities with robust coastal restoration programs. How those entities manage their programs and how big are their respective dredge fleets? You know, I said that I think in the last 10 years, China has built

200 dredge boats. And, you know, of course, Europe has, you know, the Netherlands has, like I said, a commitment to a 1992 coastline. All these places, they primarily work in the international market now like belgium the netherlands they service an international need because a lot of countries don't have the expertise and capacity to build these highly specialized vessels china obviously is i think they've built they've dredged and used those vessels in almost every province and they're up they're using it as a tool of statecraft with countries they don't like that recently read so i mean those those are very robust big programs and uh you know there have have been recent efforts and conversations about repealing the Jones Act, the Merchant Marine Act,

and the Foreign Dredge Act to give America access to the European fleets. In the Netherlands, the Embassy of the Netherlands has been very active in these conversations, surprisingly. And I would argue that America is a fairly large country, and we don't merely want access to European fleet. We want our own fleet that we have, because we still have demobilization, mobilization and competition to deal with. Well, if the Netherlands needs all those boats at one point, well, that leaves America kind of without what it needs to do what it needs to do. I mean, we can certainly requisition those in times of wartime. That certainly happened. But I don't think we want to be in that situation. I think we want to have the internal expertise and we want to

have the internal capacity necessary to make sure that our ports are accessible, our inland waterways are navigable and are coast protected from storms. The final question I had for you is what is your proposal then to resolve Louisiana's issue? Well, Louisiana's issue is America's issue. You know, Louisiana is not the only area needing coastal nourishment. Right now, Texas is starting what's called Ike's Dyke. They're trying to replicate what the Netherlands has done, which is called a sand motor, where they go out and dredge a large piece of area and they create this kind of artificial island and allow like the sand to kind of migrate you know through you know wind and build this you know this coastal barrier and that is going to put Texas in competition with

Louisiana's program it's going to put it in competition with the Atlantic's um you know bolstering of its own coast after what is it I forget Isaac from years ago I mean they're still rebuilding coastal communities after that um the solution is we need a public dredge fleet again We need our own capacity to do this work. Because the way that the Army Corps of Engineers prioritizes projects is a tool of rationing. Would you know that it originated in the Army Corps of Engineers over its own water resource management programs that were being rationed? So there's a tool created specifically for the core. And I would argue that that is a bad tool because what it does is that it puts, you know, multimillion dollar properties, you know, it's like, if you have 10 million, 10 multimillion dollar properties versus a hundred houses, well, CBA would say that those 10

houses should be preserved more than those a hundred, a hundred houses. I don't think that's how we should delegate public goods and services in the United States of America. I think we should try to protect as many people as we can instead of just rationing out to the highest bidder. And so what we need is a actual well-funded U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that is able to programmatically dredge and fill what it needs to on a yearly basis. It should not be done through the Water Resources Development Act as this big, you know, fits of funding. It should be done on a programmatic level. We should have hopper dredges on the Atlantic coast, in the Gulf of Mexico, in the Great Lakes, in the Pacific.

We should amend the Merchant Marine Act to ensure that freight between, you know, Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Alaska is not so onerous on the citizens. I agree. We should, as you and I spoke before the top of this, we should amend and fix what we have in terms of offshore labor in the OCS, the Outer Continental Shelf, our federal waters. We should ensure that mariners working in the United States federal waters are protected and have good federal oversight. We should do a lot. I'm like, I should give you my laundry list. But we need to ensure that public goods and services are serving the public good and that we should do it in a way that is well funded. And, you know, I think that we can reopen shipyards to rebuild these vessels. We have, what, three naval architecture and maritime marine engineering schools in the United States. Those should be well-funded. They should have their own towing, their own, excuse me, what is that called? The towing tank. They should have their computational fluid dynamics labs. They should have everything they need to do the most cutting-edge research.

you know we should not be falling behind like we are in this area you know I had my husband and I went to I'm trying to remember it was not Utrecht Delft we went to Delft and I went we went and visited the the school there and they have like whole dredging programs they have I mean this is a beautiful facility and just to see that compared to the University of New Orleans where they had like four master students in this small little space it's you know it's kind of humbling to see where we have allowed ourselves to be. I think that we need to re-envision what our coast and what our ports and everything can look like for the United States. Our ports should not be competing amongst each other for access for routine maintenance. This is ridiculous. We

should not have boats grounded on our inland waterways because they have not been able to secure funding or access to these vessels in 15 years. Whole communities should not be washing away because they're not million-dollar houses. They're not a petrochemical facility. They're not a Miami high-rise, even though those are washing away as well. We need to build the tools and mobilize to protect our country and its people. And that means staffing and funding what is necessary. Well, thank you very much, Megan. Where can we find you online and what are you working on next? Okay. Well, you can find me on Twitter. That's where you find most people who have a lot of opinions. So you found me. My handle is Bayou Terrier. And what I'm working on right

now is actually abandoned oil and gas wells. Because if you want to dredge, you have to go and access sandy shoals. But unfortunately, in the Gulf of Mexico, where we need to access our sand, there are several orphaned wells, wells that have not been capped, and about 18,000 miles of abandoned in place pipelines that need to be removed. So that's another thing that I'm working on right now. I'm working on trying to create a new federal agency, the Abandoned Well Administration, to employ out-of-work oil and gas workers towards the task of locating and plugging in abandonment and monitoring the 10 million plus orphans, abandoned and legacy wells that pockmarked the United States. I am very niche in a lot of areas,

but my goal is to put people to work to do necessary things. That's generally my theme. Well, thank you again for coming on. To our listeners, thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next time. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 We'll be right back.