Rail And River Transportation Meet

This is one of those things that sounds just a little bit too outlandish to be true, but it is. Back in the 1990s, I rode the M/V Rusty Flowers with the mate and the relief captain from the M/V Clyde Butcher, they told me of their experiences, but the outlandishness of the accident had reached me long before I worked with them. If you doubt me on this one, do a google search for “train hits towboat wisconsin”, and you should get a short Journal Of Commerce article about it. I can no longer find the accident report on the NTSB website.

Anyway, here we go...

Towboats regularly have to wait their turn for lockage. Above and below each lock, there are agreed-upon areas where they can push or back their tow into the bank, and wait on traffic and their turn at the lock. This brings us to the star of this tale, the Motor Vessel Clyde Butcher. The Clyde was owned by the American Commercial Barge Line and had been built by their subsidiary shipyard, Jeffboat, in 1966. Back then, it ran the Upper Mississippi through the navigation season, and elsewhere during the winter.

This tale takes place on the Upper Mississippi, upstream of Lock 5A, near Fountain City, Wisconsin, early on the morning of July 8, 1991. The dam spans the river, and the lock is approximately in the middle of the river. As there is no place for southbound traffic to wait immediately above the lock, they back in along the bank on the Wisconsin side of the river to wait. That side of the river is also the Burlington Northern (now it's BNSF) railway's mainline between Chicago, and Saint Paul, Minnesota, and this line sees a considerable amount of train traffic.

The Clyde was southbound with a full tow of fifteen loaded barges, and they had to wait on northbound boats to complete their lockage, so they backed in along the bank by the BN trackage on the Wisconsin side of the river. When the northbound boat cleared, the Clyde attempted to back out into the channel, but couldn't. They had developed a bank suction.

This occurs when a tow of fully loaded barges sets tightly against the bank, and then, when the boat tries to move the tow away from the bank, it can't develop enough “twisting force” to overcome the weight of the water on the outside of the tow to allow the water to flow in on the side facing the bank.

A good way to overcome this is to knock out (i.e. disconnect the boat from the tow) and move the boat to the channel side stern corner of the tow, put a capstan line on it, and then pull at right angles to the stern of the tow. This develops much more usable pulling power, but it takes time and effort to do this.

This isn't what the pilot of the Clyde chose to do. For some reason. he was allergic to the idea of knocking out and pulling at right angles. What he did do was to put the flanking rudders (you use those to steer when you're backing up) hard down to port, and backed on it full astern.

The problem here is that this doesn't develop enough force to overcome the bank suction, and the full discharge from both propellers was directed right onto the bank, which eventually started eroding it. Bear in mind that there's a heavily used double track railroad mainline on top of this bank. 

The pilot kept it up, backing full astern on both engines, for two and a half hours. More and more of the bank was being washed away by the water coming out of what amounted to two 2500 horsepower pumps with impellers that are nine feet in diameter. The bank kept falling into the river, and the pilot kept doing the same thing...

Sammy, the mate that I rode the Rusty Flowers with, was standing on the stern corner of the tow, telling the pilot what was going on by radio, and getting no acknowledgment. He knew this was serious enough that he went to the wheelhouse to talk to the pilot. He pointed out what was going on, telling him he was endangering the railroad. He was ignored, the pilot wouldn't even look around to see what was happening. Sammy went back to the tow and continued to radio the damage being done.

His last radio transmission to the wheelhouse was this: “I am standing here, looking at ties and rail hanging in thin air.” The pilot kept backing on it full astern.

 

This is the accident area as seen from Route 35, with a stopped BNSF train. You can see the dam, and the lock is just to the right of the dam, where you can see the radio tower and crane boom.

 

Shortly after this exchange, a deckhand that was watching from the second deck screamed, “HERE COMES A TRAIN!!!” Yep, the inevitable... A manifest freight, being pulled by two locomotives, running southbound at 42 miles an hour.

The lead locomotive made it over the washout, but the trailing locomotive and the train did not. The trailing locomotive and about thirteen cars of the train came crashing down the bank. The locomotive plowed its way up the port side of the boat from the rudder room almost to the galley, tearing open the side of the deckhouse all the way.

The chief engineer had been back in the rudder room, doing some maintenance on the boat's air compressors. He saw what was coming, and ran as fast as he could for the main deck accommodations. As he was yanking open the door into the quarters from the forward engine room, rocks, wood, and dirt were hitting him in the back. It was lucky for him that he was up; if he had been off watch and in bed, he would have been dead, his quarters were a small cabin and the engineer's booth on the port side of the main deck between the rudder room and the engine room. His bunk was on the outboard bulkhead that was shredded by the locomotive.

A couple of the rail cars crashing down the bank were lumber racks. The deckhand who was up on the second deck of the Clyde saw what was coming, and decided that now was the time to terminate his contract to ride that boat, and he dove into the river from the second deck on the channel side. The second deck ended up heaped with lumber.

When the trailing locomotive was done wreaking havoc on the deckhouse of the Clyde, it ended up in the river alongside the boat. Its fuel tank was torn open during the crash, so the diesel fuel was leaking into the river.

Among the rail cars were a couple more boxcars loaded with butter. Nobody that I talked with was sure how it started, but somehow, the spilled butter caught fire, so now there was an honest to god butter fire melting and burning the butter, and setting wood and paper on fire as well. (Only in Wisconsin...) A Coast Guard fireboat was dispatched to the scene from Dubuque, Iowa to help fight the fires and boom off the oil in the water.

The deckhand that jumped suffered some minor injuries, he was treated and released from a local hospital, as was one of the rail crew who was aboard the lead locomotive. Other than that, nobody was hurt. The deckie did cause a bit of a panic, as nobody could find him for a while.

The railroad had to shut down its mainline for a couple of days for clearing debris and repairs, and the Coast Guard shut down nine miles of river for two days as well.

I don't know about the damage to the trailing locomotive, but it had to be substantial. The Clyde Butcher had lost its air compressors in the crash, so it was immobilized and had to be towed downriver to the St. Louis area for repairs. It did go back into service after the repairs.

After everything shook out, the Coast Guard and the Corps Of Engineers made that waiting area a caution zone. You can still see the notation on the Upper Mississippi chart for the area. It's still on Chart 32; a purple box on the right hand edge of the chart that reads,

Critical Zone;

Potential Railroad

Trackbed Erosion

728.8 -729.3 L

 

The relevant section of Upper Mississippi River navigation chart #32.

 

 

A Journal Of Commerce article that I was able to find had put a thumbnail estimate of damages of at least $1.0 million for the railroad alone.

The pilot was not fired for this colossal piece of bad judgment. The company lawyers convinced his bosses that firing him would be an admission of guilt, so he continued to work there. He did earn a new nickname only used behind his back, however. 

“Choo-Choo”...

CSX was the majority owner of ACBL while I worked for them (That time. But that's another river story.). I was living in Utica, Illinois at the time I rode a trip with Sammy and the relief captain of the Clyde. I had just come home from that trip, and I was researching a compressed air drain system that I had built intending to patent it. I wanted to look over a locomotive's air drain system, so I stopped by the CSX depot in Ottawa to ask if I could go on the property to look over a locomotive's drain system. The trainmaster was in. I introduced myself and told him that I worked for “the barge line”. He immediately perked up. “Do you know anything about an ACBL towboat getting hit by a BN train over on the Mississippi?”, he asked. I replied, “Is there any coffee to spare in that thermos?” “Yep!” “Pour me a cup and I'll tell you about it, I just got off the boat, and I worked with two of the crew of the Clyde this trip.” He poured, and I told him this story. When we were done, he let out a little whistle and said, “A railroad suing a railroad... Do you have any idea of how long that this will be dragged through the courts?” I assured him that I had no idea. He said, “Lawyers will be hired by both roads, work their whole careers and retire before this is settled.” I never was able to find out if he was right.

https://www.joc.com/train-derails-river-closing-upper-mississippi-bn-main-line-cargo-butter-wood-set-alight_19910709

Mayfield and the Fired Striker

 

We've met Chief Mayfield earlier, and it was alluded to that he was a thoroughly unsavory character, so we're going to do a deeper dive into that cesspool today. The mean-spirited tricks played on him were nearly endless, and they were all earned “benefits”, so here's a few that he had served up.

He annoyed our cook one trip to the point that Bill was dipping his coffee mug in dishwater and letting it dry that way without rinsing the detergent off. A week of this, and Mayfield went home with dishwater dysentery.

He used to leave his work boots outside the door to his cabin. After a dustup with the crew, someone installed a raw egg in the toe of each boot. :-)

His cabin was over the starboard side of the deck locker. For part of one trip, the deckhands would wait till he was asleep (after 1200, or after midnight!), and take a ratchet turnbuckle and hammer the steel right under his bed as hard as they could, and then run back to the lounge and resume their card game as nothing had happened. I never did find out what brought that one on.

The previously mentioned incidents of being locked in the tool crib, and having his pants legs tied into knots that could not be undone.

Although I never had it verified, it is almost a certainty that someone added urine to his Listerine bottle at some point.

He had the habit of leaving his coffee mug on a filing cabinet out in the engine room, and it sporadically made the trip to the lounge head, had the rim “petered”, and then put back on the filing cabinet.

 

One afternoon, the deckhands hung a work vest over the handrail outside his cabin, right near the head of his bed, where the wind blew the metal buckles against the steel.

Like I said, these and others were earned benefits. The following tale is representative of the way that he earned them, but it's especially egregious.

In “Floyd and Mayfield, Part 1”, I told about having to meet the boat early at a place where we did not normally do crew changes because Mayfield had fired the striker. This is the rest of that story.

I got on the Transporter at Greenville, Mississippi that time, and at the first watch change, Mayfield was regaling me with how he had to fire the striker because he partially flooded the lower engine room with fuel. I listened to his rant with a few nods, but silently withheld judgment based on his reputation for underhandedness.

A week or two passed, and I was up in the wheelhouse one afternoon visiting with the pilot. Curly was a friend, and the conversation drifted around to the striker that Mayfield had fired. I made a doubting comment on it, and Curly asked, “Did you hear the whole story?” I had not, so he proceeded to relate it. 

The trouble had begun while they were southbound. They had changed oil filters in one engine while doing tow work at Cairo. The filters had been draining while the boat was southbound, this was something that you had to do before either burning them or disposing of them with a vendor, as the individual filter elements were the size of a grown man's leg and there were nineteen elements in the filter tank that had been changed out. Each one held a lot of oil, so if you didn't drain them, they made quite a mess. Even afterward they were still very oily.

As the Transporter approached New Orleans, Mayfield decided that the nineteen filters had drained enough, and he ordered the striker to toss them in the river to dispose of them. Now, this had been technically illegal since the 1890s, and since the passage of the Clean Water Act, that was illegal and prosecutable. The striker knew this and refused to toss them in the river. He told Mayfield that he would burn them instead (Still legal at that time, but is not now.), but Mayfield said either throw them in the river or I'll fire you! The guy stood up for what was right and still refused, and told Mayfield that his first stop was going to be the Coast Guard Marine Safety Office in New Orleans to turn him in...

Curly said that the next thing was that they were having a powwow with Orval, the captain. The outcome was that the filters were burned and the striker was not fired.

For the time being, as it turned out. As the boat headed back north, Mayfield set the striker up with so much cleaning back in the rudder room that the man was out of the engine room most of the watch, far enough away from the engine room that he could not see or hear what might be going on up there. His only notification of a problem would be either other crew members or the alarm siren.

To understand what happened next, you need a little background on the boat's fuel system and the way the boat itself was constructed. Fuel tanks are built into the hull, with two tanks outboard of the engine room, one on each side. Fuel tanks have a stripping valve; the purpose is that the valve and piping is set up in such a way that you can use them to check the tank for any accumulated water and to drain it if you find any.

The Transporter and her three sisters were also double bottom boats, very unusual for a towboat. Normally a towboat is a single bottom, meaning that there is open space between the bottom of the boat and the deck plates, this is the bilge. In a double bottom boat what is normally the bilge is sealed off and made into tank space, so other accommodations have to be made for the assorted oily “drippage” that happens with the machinery. In this case, these boats had small pits called rose boxes equipped with a bilge pump suction at the back end of the engine room. There were three on each side, as the engine and gearbox structures (the stringers) divided each side into three sections, so each needed its own drain setup. The fuel tank stripping valves for the side tanks were located on the outboard side of the engine room and were serviced by the far outboard rose box and bilge suction.

Mayfield's “story” was that he entered the engine room at about 1430, and smelled fuel. Looking around, he found the outboard area of the port lower engine room flooded with fuel to a depth of about one foot. He then went back to the rudder room, collared the striker and showed him the internal fuel spill, and fired him again. This time it stuck, as there was no way for the captain to verify what Mayfield was telling him about how it happened. 

What he was telling Orval was suspicious on a couple of counts. Number one was that the chief normally didn't visit the engine room while off watch unless there was a machinery alarm or a crew member knocked on the chief's door and told him about a problem. Neither one happened in this case. The other thing was that Mayfield's official story was that the fuel valve had vibrated open and that the striker didn't catch the problem. Those stripping valves were gate valves, and they didn't just vibrate open; they required, let's say, manual input to open. Furthermore, these were small valves and pipes, and that stripping valve had to be all the way open to spill that much fuel in a short amount of time.

Curly and I discussed it, and we were both very certain that Mayfield had shown up down below and had spun that valve open, waited till a good amount of fuel had accumulated, and then started his revenge plan for having being threatened with the Coast Guard, truly the actions of a five-star rat, but the firing stuck anyway. At least, at that time, we were hiring through the NMU hiring halls, so the firing did not affect the man's ability to stay employed.

Fast forward less than a year. Mayfield and I had had another argument. The next night, on the midnight to six watch, he set me to work back in the rudder room. Being suspicious of him, I'd scoot up to the engine room to check in frequently. Sure enough, about two hours into the watch, I went forward for a check and smelled fuel. And once again, there was fuel in the same area, just not as deep as the last time, and the stripping valve for that fuel tank was wide open. I closed the valve and used the bilge pump to pump the spilled (and now contaminated) fuel to the slop tank.

Shortly after I was done, he showed up in the engine room and yelled at me for not being in the rudder room. I told him that I found the starboard outboard lower engine room flooded with fuel from the stripping valve again, that the valve was wide open; I flat out called him a rotten son of a bitch and said that he was trying to set me up the same way that he did the guy he fired. He wildly denied everything, but I kept after him on it till he left and went back to his cabin. This time at least, nothing more came of it, but he confirmed through his actions what he had done to my predecessor.

Galley Problems

 

So, it's 1984, and I'm running chief on Valley Line's M/V Brandon, and we're on the Illinois River. This boat is a great gig. We have a really good crew on board, everyone gets along well from the captain on down, the boat is mechanically in decent shape and doesn't put much stress at all on me, and we have Theresa in the galley, which is another big plus, as she's a great cook and a really good person to work with.

Back then, Valley had an earned reputation as being extremely cheap. Our common joke was that we worked for Bird Barge Lines (cheep! cheep!), and they had the ribbing on that one coming. Provisions were basic. There was no such thing as biscuits in a tube or other kinds of prepared food, and the office was known to squawk a time or two over the boat buying too many frozen vegetables.

So it should not be a surprise to learn that there was no machine dishwasher, the “dishwasher” was the armstrong variety, the cook. And the cook had to do this three times a day, every day for a thirty-day hitch, the only help that they got was that any dirty dishes created by late night snacking had to be cleaned up before the cook came in to prepare breakfast. Things tended to get a little tense if the deck crew dropped the ball on that chore.

So, one summer evening, we're motoring up the Illinois River above Peoria, headed for the Chicago metro area. I've been pottering around the lower engine room, replacing an unloader valve on one of the air compressors, when Theresa shows up. This is a bit unusual. She motions to me to follow her, and we head up to my little air conditioned booth on the main deck, where we can talk without having to shout.

When we get the door closed, she's a bit vexed and lets me know that the galley sink won't drain at all. This is a bit surprising, as that drain line is a relatively short run of 2-inch pipe that goes overboard on the starboard side.

I grab a flat bottom plunger, and we go back to the galley. I have her hold a piece of sheet rubber over the drain on the other side, and I go to town on my side with the plunger. To no effect. A couple of more tries, and with the same result, absolutely nothing. We give up on that, and I tell her that I'm on it, I'll be back in a bit.

I have no drain snake on board (cheep!), so I start looking the piping over, looking for a cleanout. The line drops down from the galley into the forward lower engine room, makes a 90-degree turn to go aft, and passes through the lower engine room bulkhead. Continuing on from the aft side of the bulkhead, I spotted the line again, and sure enough, right over the starboard engine's oil filter tank, the line takes another 90 degree turn to go overboard, but that turn is a tee, with a pipe plug facing the engine for a cleanout.

Picking up a pipe wrench, I put “the lean” on the plug, and it starts to turn. I get it to the point where it's only finger tight, and I spin it out by hand...

The last threads disengage, and a solid slug of gray water, two inches in diameter blows the pipe plug out of my hand, soaks me to the skin, and splatters all over the front of the starboard engine, splashing back on me, and getting the few dry spots that the outgoing water missed. Something else splattered the front of the engine, and another item clattered to the deck at my feet. Shaking the water out of my hair and eyes, I reached down to pick up a table fork. Looking back at the front of the engine, there's a dishrag hanging from one of the oil lines! 

Holy hell, how did the two of you get this far down that pipe? Being soft, I get it (sort of!) with the dishrag, but that fork also made it around two elbows before everything got jammed up at the cleanout! Anyway, that's a mystery that I never did come up with a plausible explanation for.

I squished my way up the stairs and forward to the galley. Theresa took one look at me and exploded with laughter. She went on to the point where the laughing gave her the hiccups, which got me laughing! When we both ran out of breath, I held out the fork and the dishrag and asked if she was missing anything, and that got us both going again.

And so ends another summer evening watch... ;-)

Floyd & Mayfield, Part 1

 In the late seventies, I was the after watch guy in the engine room on the Valley Transporter. For part of my trip, I would end up working for an engineer called Juel Mayfield. To say that Mayfield was a difficult person would be understating things considerably. The man was overbearing, shifty, underhanded and vindictive, and he didn't limit this to just me, no, the whole crew was fair game, and he was universally hated by everybody on board.

For example, he would work on something in the engine room, and leave tools and rags wherever he dropped them, and tell me to clean up. Not a big deal, it was my job after all, but he would deliberately hide tools. I wouldn't find these, of course, and the next time I came on watch, I'd get ripped to shreds for not putting all the tools away. Another part of my job was to learn how to work on the equipment. Heh, not with Mayfield around. As Richard McKenna, the author of “The Sand Pebbles”, stated it in one of his short stories, “King's Horsemen”, Mayfield would sit on a nickel's worth of knowledge like it was the Great Inca Treasure. Anytime something had to be worked on while I was around, he made damn sure that I had a nice hot corner to clean up, far away from what he was doing.

I had originally had the misfortune to work for Mayfield on the A. M. Thompson, on the Illinois River. Realizing pretty quickly that I wasn't going to learn much on there, when the chance to transfer to the Valley Transporter came along, I jumped at the opportunity. I had about a little more than a year of peace and quiet, working for two good engineers, when it all came crashing down. I got a call from the crew dispatcher three days before I was due to go back to work, asking if I was willing to come back early. I agreed, but he said that I would have to meet the boat at Greenville, Mississippi. I was instantly on alert, as Greenville was not a regular crew change point. I asked why there, and he said that they had fired the striker, and needed someone right away. “Who's the engineer?”, I asked. “Mayfield.”, came the answer. “OK, I said, “I'll go, but you know my history with him. I may well get off at Memphis.” The dispatcher said, “That's OK, you'll be helping me out big time even if you do. Just let me know as soon as you can if you have to.” Turned out that the good times were over; Chief Bill had retired, and Mayfield had taken his place as one of the regulars. Damn... So that was how I ended up saddled with Mayfield again, after running away to the Lower Mississippi to get away from him

But anyway, on to our other main character in this little drama. Floyd was, in no uncertain terms, quite a rounder. Funny and obscene when sober, and many orders of magnitude worse when drunk, which he was pretty regularly when off the boat. Floyd and Mayfield had a real hate for each other, and it was always on display, by Mayfield with his nasty comments, and by Floyd mainly by his actions. Witness the following vignette...

As I've said, I worked the back watch then, from noon till six, and from midnight till six, so I would get up late in the morning, have lunch, and head back to the engine room. We had a nice little tool crib on the Transporter. Henry (the other chief, a great guy) and I had built it from angle iron and expanded metal because we laid the boat up in New Orleans fairly frequently, and tool theft was a problem. With the crib, everything valuable was already in there, so all we had to do was slap a lock on it for layup, and all was safe.

Well, as I walked past this on my way from the galley to the booth, it was immediately on the right as you stepped in through the port aft engine room door. On this particular morning, when I stepped in, there was Mayfield in the tool crib, beet red in the face and soaked in sweat, with the door locked! What the hell?!? He frantically motioned to me to unlock the door, so I got the keys from the booth, and let him out, and we headed back to the booth.

He was madder than a half drowned cat!

The story was that he was puttering around in the tool crib at about 0700 with his back to the door, and turned around to find himself locked in! He didn't see who did it, but he was cussing Floyd up one side and down the other. I said something about how it could have been anybody (and it truly could have been!), but no, he wasn't having any of that! “IT WAS THAT SONOFABITCH FLOYD HEATH! THAT'S WHO IT WAS! I DIDN'T HAVE TO SEE IT HAPPEN TO KNOW!!!”

Wow!

At that point I was simply reduced to listening until he ran out of steam and stomped off to lunch.

I filled out the engine room log and did my rounds, chuckling to myself about this all the while. A little later, when the deckhands were back off of the tow, I found Floyd in the lounge.

“Hey, did you lock Mayfield in the tool crib?”, I asked, grinning.

The wolfish grin through the thick mustache, over the mug of coffee was all the answer that was necessary.

“Hope he was in there long enough that he wet himself.”. Floyd said.