Towboat on the Ohio by James E. Casto

Author:James E. Casto [Casto, James E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780813189208
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Willow Island and Beyond

Willow Island Locks and Dam—at Mile 162—replaced obsolete Locks 15, 16, and 17. It has two locks—one is 1,200 feet long and the other 600 feet—which are on the Ohio side. There’s an observation platform, which allows visitors a good view of boats and barges as they lock through. (The platform, it might be noted, also provides those in the pilothouse of the Blazer a good chance to scan the visitors with binoculars, looking—alas, in vain—for pretty girls.) The locks were completed and placed in service in 1972; the dam itself was finished four years later. The project’s total cost: $78.1 million.

We’re the only boat on hand, so locking our way through takes only forty-five minutes or so. Then we’re on our way again—for all of ten minutes, until we reach Eureka, West Virginia. There we tie off the tow and work free the empty barge—the AO-334—that we picked up at Marietta.

It’s time for the watch to change.

“Well, what do you say now, Ronnie?” asks Captain Davis as he enters the pilothouse. Quickly, Burge briefs the captain on our status, then heads below.

The empty AO-334 is to be delivered to the Quaker State Refinery at St. Mary’s, West Virginia, but there’s no room to maneuver it free from the tow there. So, we will leave the rest of the barges here, shuttle the AO-334 the four miles or so up to St. Mary’s, then return and pick up the tow. We leave one of the young deckhands aboard the barges to keep an eye on them while we’re gone. He has an emergency light, a radio, and a bottle of water. Then we push off and head upriver.

All this is happening in the shadow of the two giant cooling towers of the Willow Island Power Station. Owned by Monongahela Power, Willow Island looks more or less like the other generating plants that line the banks of the Ohio, but, unlike them, it has a grim story to tell—a story of fifty-one men killed in an April 27, 1978 construction accident. The men were standing on a scaffolding at the top of a 168-foot cooling tower, still under construction. They were preparing to pour a layer of concrete when the scaffolding gave away, dumping them to the ground. “I looked up, and men were screaming and hollering,” said one witness. “They just fell like dominoes.”

None of those on the scaffold survived.

“I never go by here and look at those towers that I don’t think about those men,” says the captain.

We float along in silence for a while.

At St. Mary’s we find another barge already tied up, which means that docking is no easy chore. Unlike most houses along the river, which are perched well up the bank, well out of reach of high water, two houses here have been built only a few feet from the dock. The residents come out to stand in the yard and watch us dock. Things must be awfully dull in St. Mary’s if this is the most exciting thing that’s going on.

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