Had a beer with a retired cutterhead operator who said 'You're not moving mud, you're moving time.' Kinda stuck with me.

3 comments

3 Comments

He was close, but that's not quite it. You're not moving time, you're buying it. Every yard you move is a little more life you get back from the river.

janac591mo ago

The Fifth Ward contract I worked on back in '06 taught me that lesson the hard way. We spent three months dredging the turning basin, and every time we pulled up a bucket, that old river water just rushed right back in to fill the hole. You can't beat the river, you can only outrun it for a while. That's why you always bid for extra maintenance cycles, because the clock starts ticking again the second you finish.

matthew1222mo ago

My old foreman on the Mobile Bay project always said we were moving history, not time. Each scoop of silt had layers of stuff washed down from three states over the last century. I see what @tara_williams1 means about buying time, but that mud is the river's memory. We just put it somewhere else for a while.