Friday, January 6, 2017

Another record set in towboat building

Florida Marine sends its boats up the Ohio River past Huntington every now and then. According to this article at marinelink.com, Florida Marine took delivery last week of two more boats from Eastern Shipbuiding Group. The new boats are the M/V Capt. Ricky Torres and the M/V Cullen Pasentine.

That makes 65 boats of the same design Eastern Shipbuilding has built for Florida Marine.

Says the article:

This ongoing order for 90’ towboats originally began with a twenty-five (25) vessel contract, starting in 2006 and was successfully completed with on-time deliveries. It has expanded to become the largest single Owner, single Shipbuilder, new construction program with the same class towboat design in United States history.


This and that in the news, 1/6/2017

Here's a guy at Blennerhassett Island who was taking a boat out on the river when it stalled and began drifting in the channel toward a towboat and barges coming his way. So he jumped in the river and swam to shore. He didn't die from hypothermia because ... read the story.

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Meanwhile, here's a piece about a solar-powered camera at the site of old Lock and Dam 35 that's keeping watch on blue-green algae in the river, the kind that turned the river a bright green in the late summer of 2015.

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Part of a riverfront park in Cincinnati is closed because it's slipping into the Ohio River. The slip was caused by a collapsed sewer line, which will be replaced when the river goes down.

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A small refinery at Somerset, Kentucky, has expanded its barge operations to receive more product.

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And DuPont has been ordered to pay $10.5 million in punitive damages to an Ohio man. A federal jury made that determination Wednesday following its verdict last month that C8 from the company's plant near Parkersburg, West Virginia, caused his testicular cancer.