1975 Newburgh Locks and Dam

(Satellite)

I organized the photos of the tows I took while I was in the area by the tows: #1, #2, #3 and #4.

This dam is just a little upstream from Newburgh, IN. Someplace I saw this dam referred to as #13, but I can't find that info again to confirm it. So I'll leave the number out of the title. Actually, because numbers were used for the old Wicker Dams on the Ohio River, I think they avoid numbers for the new dams. That is why they have names. This dam replaced L&D #46 and #47.

USACE

An overview from downstream does not include the auxiliary 600x110-foot lock behind the trees on the left. The lock we see is the main 1200x110-foot lock. This was taken from a trail that goes along side the Newburgh road.

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I digitally zoomed in on the gates so that you can see, numbering from the right (south), that gates 2 and 4 are a little lower than the others. And it is not an illusion that the lower pool is not much lower than the upper pool. Watching the top of towboats while they went down in the lock looked like a drop of just three or four feet.

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And they allow you to walk upstream on a flood plain. So I got an upstream overview of the gates and locks. Unfortunately, the guidewall blocks the view of the gates.

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This dam was built in the 1960s. The Army Corps of Engineers learned a couple of things since they built the dams on the Mississippi in the 1930s. One is that the main lock is 1200 feet long instead of 600 feet. The other is that the guide wall is between the lock and the dam instead of along the shore to help fight outdraft. We can see this more clearly in a satellite photo.

FlashEarth

There is a park that was built to provide an overview of the locks and dams. And it used to be the first place I would go to when I visited the dam. But they have let the trees grow so that now the view is very frustrating. You can't see much of the locks at all.

The sign at the overview has the following text.

The Ohio River stretches 981 miles from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to just past Cairo, Illinois,  where it joins the Mississippi River. The Newburgh Locks and Dam is one of twenty on the river. The dams raise the water level to maintain navigable river depth, and the locks allow river traffic to move around the dams. Construction of the Newburgh Locks and Dam began in 1966 and was completed in 1975. The 2,275.5 foot long dam creates an upper pool that can be as much as 16 feet deeper than the lower pool. Each of the dam's nine movable gates is 32 feet high, 110 feet wide, and weighs 778,000 pounds. Water can flow through the 1,200-foot and 600-foot lock chambers at a rate of a million gallons a minute.

This is the best shot I could get of the water flow through the gates.

Judging from the water turbulence, gates 1, 2, and 4 are closed and the other gates are not open very far. The angle of the trunnion arms also indicates that gates 3,5,6,7,8, and probably 9, are not open very far. Gate 1 surprised me because in the downstream view I thought it was open. So I zoomed in on it some more.

This picture is at camera resolution. I can now see that this gate looked higher because the gantry crane has installed a bulkhead on the upstream side of this gate for maintenance. It was the bulkhead that made this gate look higher than Gate 2 when I first looked at the photo.

Below is a view taken from downtown Newburgh that is square with the gates. Unfortunately, the day was still hazy.

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I zoomed in on Gate 4 because it does not have trees in the background.

This shot confirms that cables instead of a chain are used to hoist the gates. I think it is 6 cables. I fired up Gimp to try to improve the contrast of the cables. But that did not help. This reminds me that whenever I watch some gal in a crime TV show hit a few keys on the keyboard and a picture becomes usable that TV shows are fiction. If there is a shaft between the two hoist houses for a gate to synchronize the rotation of the winches, it is lost in the shadows. I suspect there is because why else build a permanent maintenance walkway unless there are shaft bearings to grease? So I went back to a photo taken from the overview and zoomed in on a gate.

This is at camera resolution, and it is clear that there is a shaft running between the houses. In fact, the walkway is also the support structure for the bearings that hold the shaft.

First of five photos posted by Skyler McCallum that he took going upbound, cropped
[The gates don't look too high, but the water appears to be covering the fixed weir part of the dam.]

Hydrograph
[Skyler posted his photos 11 hours before I accessed this graph, but I don't know what Skyler's interval was between taking and posting the photos. Each rainstorm event seems to affect the river level.]

Mike Murphy posted four photos with the comment: "Running the back side at Newburgh lock S/B." [It appears by "backside" he means they are going over the fixed weir part of the dam!. That would mean the river level is probably at least 9' above the top of the wier.]

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I think this is the first I have seen the satellite catching a tow approaching a lock. The 15-barge tow is a reminder that the locks on the Ohio River are 1200' long.

Satellite

Feb 8, 2022: Christopher Conley posted four photos with the comment: "Early this morning a tow boat lost power and it ability to steer. Barges have broken free and are now pinned along the east side of Newburgh Dam on the Ohio River.   92.5 The Country Station! WBKR"

Bobby Shields: Ronald Wagonblast was the boat. Heavy drift in the wheels. High water will do that. No fatalities is all that matters.

[The river is high enough that the gates are probably all the way open. This accident would explain why I saw a post about a runaway. I didn't save the post because it didn't have any information. Since a two would have a multiple of three barges and there are only eight blocked by the dam, that implies one of them did go under a gate and on downriver. Some others are close to "escaping." They are going to have to get at least one of those barges out of there before they can close a gate.]

Tiffany Martin: They got the runaway barge the crew got it in safely.

David Gulden shared

Steven Bruni shared

Steven Fancher: That lock gets pretty nasty when the waters running hard

Tim Mccarl: No the boat did NOT lose power!!! He lost steering not power nor propulsion!!!! Mainstream media at its best.

Jonathan Ray Rodola: Dang drift

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Michael Farmer: On top of that, the river is rising.

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[It looks like the USACE has two towboats docked there. Why haven't they invented some sort of boom technology so that they can use them to clear that debris out of the lock? ]

It looks like they have just a couple of days to remove any barges blocking gates or they could loose the pool.

USGS

A bill was passed in 2018 to require federal agencies to cooperate to reduce the licensing interval for adding hydropower from 10-12 years to 2 years. [CourierPress, registration count 3]