The Hot Barge

 

 

So, it's the summer of 2006, and I'm on the Joy Anne Keller. We are doing the slog between Cairo, Illinois, and the New Orleans area; four days southbound with 35 loads and eight days northbound with twenty-four loads and eleven empties. Cargo is mixed on the northbound run; bulk commodities include basic aluminum, fertilizer, alumina, and petroleum coke.

Petroleum coke is one of those cargoes that moves both ways on the river, and the crews hate the stuff. The lump form of it is OK, but usually what we were hauling was the powdered form. It is a bottom petroleum product, and it's very tarry but can be blown around by the wind. It gets inside and sticks to any horizontal surface, and won't wipe off like dust, it has to be scrubbed off. It's ten times worse on the deck, only detergent, hot water and a lot of elbow grease will remove it. Haul it northbound, and the whole crew spends the southbound trip cleaning the boat.

 

Pet coke is the leftovers of the oil refining process, and its primary use is in steel production. It took the place of coke, which was made by baking coal in huge airtight ovens. That process drove off all the volatiles in coal, leaving almost pure carbon to fuel the smelting process. As can well be imagined, that process was incredibly polluting, so over time, coke production from coal was reduced and petroleum coke (Called pet coke for short) took its place. As an aside, when I started on the river in 1976, our wanderings took us through South Chicago, which at that time was a hotbed of steel-making with Acme, Republic, Wisconsin Steel, and US Steel South Works in full swing. When we would go by Wisconsin Steel when the coke ovens were in full swing, the reek from the coke ovens would wake you up gagging from a sound sleep.

 

This brings us to our northbound trip with a barge load of pet coke “on the face” (Face barge = right in front of the boat).

 

We had picked up the load in Baton Rouge and headed north. Two days later, the coke load started to smoke at the peak of the aft pile of material. Bear in mind, that this stuff is fuel for a steel-making furnace. The mate had come to me about it. We talked, but really didn't know the right way to deal with it, and believe it or not, the captain simply shrugged his shoulders and essentially said, “So what?” He wasn't going to do anything about it, and this hot mess was right next to our house.

 

The mate and I had another powwow about it, and we agreed to see if the pilot would go around the captain with the office to find out what we should do with it.

The pilot agreed, and he emailed the office. Within an hour, he had a reply. They said that this was the result of the pet coke being loaded hot. The product comes out of the production process very hot, and it is supposed to be spread on a concrete cooling pad in a thin layer to cool before being piled for storage or loaded for transportation, and this had been loaded hot. The firefighting advice was to sock the water to it.

 

The mate caught up with me after supper with this information, but he was at a loss as to how to get the water to the burning area. The issue was where the fire was situated. It was basically a case of somewhat spontaneous combustion; the surface of the pet coke had cooled, but deep inside, it was still near production temperatures. Heat rises, and the peak of the pile of material in the barge forms a chimney. The chimney effect draws in more oxygen, it doesn't really cool the affected area, it just adds oxygen. It's a positive feedback loop, and the fire grows, albeit slowly. It's buried deep inside the pile.

 

We pulled out the steel and pipe storage rack under the deckhouse to see what we had to work with. Luckily enough, there was a length of 1-1/4 pipe about fifteen feet long in the rack. I told the mate to knock off, I had it from here. Less than an hour later, I had a long lance made up from that pipe, and a few fittings, including a shut-off valve.

 

After the deck crew was done checking tow that evening, I corralled them to help. We ran out a fire hose and coupled it up to the lance. We got the lance into the pile, one of the guys started the fire pump, and the watchman and I started pushing the lance into the pile to the area where we guessed the fire was, pulling it back, aiming for a nearby spot, and pushing the lance in the pile again.

 

We kept this up for another half hour, and the smoke had decreased considerably. OK, that's at least some progress, let's keep an eye on it and see what transpires. By watch change at midnight, we were back to being close to what the situation had been that evening. I stayed up off watch for a while and showed the mate and his guys what we had done earlier. The mate said that he had a handle on it, and if he needed any help, he'd call me, so I went to bed.

 

The rest of the way north was a lather, rinse, repeat of that day. At the beginning of each watch, we were doing about a half hour of lancing the fire, and I think that we at least kept it from getting any worse. It went on for about another six days. When we were a day out of Cairo, the pilot contacted the office again for further instructions. They said that the barge was destined for the upper end of the Ohio River, so I wrote up what we were doing to keep the fire tamped down as much as possible for the boat that would pick up the barge at Cairo, sealed the note up in a baggie and tied it to the lance with some wire. The lance would stay with the barge, and the office said that they would bring the next boat to handle it up to speed with what had been going on. The only way to really extinguish the fire was going to be unloading it at the destination.

 

The captain never got any farther involved than stepping out of the wheelhouse to watch what we were doing a couple of times.