Beneath the murky waters that lap the edges of this old port city, a team of divers will soon wage a near-blind battle against the deterioration of Baltimore's economically vital industrial waterfront.
Much like the aged networks of water pipes, gas lines and stormwater culverts beneath Baltimore's streets, the more than half-century-old timber and concrete substructures propping up the port of Baltimore's piers have seen better days.
"Some of our berths and some of our infrastructure does date back to quite a long time ago, and we have a continuous need to maintain it and keep it functioning," said Kathleen Broadwater, the Maryland Port Administration's deputy executive director.
The state's Board of Public Works approved a nearly $9 million contract this week for 440 days of substructure repair and assessment work, about 90 percent of which will be conducted underwater by highly trained divers using specialized marine equipment.
"The difficult part in Baltimore, like most harbors, is the clarity of the water. You're working in zero visibility 90 percent of the time," said Terry Clarke, president and owner of Baltimore-based Marine Technologies Inc., which was awarded the contract.
The company's divers, Clarke said, will be "basically blindfolded" — even as they shift large concrete barriers and wield specialized welding tools.
The work will in part target "waterfront timber structures dating from 1923 and concrete structures dating from the 1930s," according to a project outline presented to the board. Due to the growing inventory of severe structural deficiencies around the port, the amount of work in this contract is about twice that of previous contracts.
Broadwater said the work will cover areas in need of repair at all of the port's public terminals, including the Dundalk and Seagirt marine terminals, but also piers in North Locust Point, which Broadwater called "a very old facility."
The contract, representing the latest in a long line of maintenance projects at the port, was approved by the board — which includes Gov. Larry Hogan, Comptroller Peter Franchot and Treasurer Nancy Kopp — without discussion, despite the fact that Marine Technologies was the only company to submit a bid.
Since Hogan's arrival in office this year, the board has railed routinely against sole-bid contracts as a threat to the state's fiscal health, but port officials defended Marine Technologies' sole bid of $8,983,855 as "fair and reasonable," saying it fell within the range of costs predicted by engineers on retainer at the port administration and under the $9 million allocated to cover the work in long-term state transportation budgets.
Officials also said the highly technical nature of the work prevented other companies identified as potential bidders from seeking the contract.
"It is very specialized work, and you not only need divers that are experienced in underwater construction, but you also need the appropriate equipment that can handle underwater work," Broadwater said. "In our history, we've never had a ton of companies come up and offer to do this kind of work."
Some companies have divers trained to conduct inspections, but not the equipment to conduct the repair work, the port administration said. Other companies have the equipment, but not the divers.
Marine Technologies, located on Fort Smallwood Road near Hawkins Point, has both — and a history of conducting complicated work on public facilities in Baltimore and around the world, from Japan to South America.
The company has about 70 divers, its own floating cranes, tugboats and decompression tanks, and specialized underwater video equipment and construction gear, Clarke said.
In a dramatic job in 2003, the company sent a team of divers swimming thousands of feet into a ruptured water pipe at the bottom of the Patapsco River as part of a $2.5 million effort to repair the line, which served 250,000 households and businesses in the region.
Some of the dives in that operation lasted so long and went so deep that divers had to decompress for more than an hour underwater before breaching the surface.
The company will again have its hands full with the new Baltimore contract, for which it will be "constantly on call," Clarke said.
All of the pier work must be conducted around the port's extremely busy shipping schedule. For much of it, crews on land will monitor special video equipment developed to operate in extremely low light, and relay information down to the divers, who Clarke said have a "sixth sense" for operating in the dark.
The divers will spend up to six hours a day underwater and travel to depths of up to 50 feet for the project, he said. Depending on the shipping schedule, work will be conducted around the clock.
In the dark, the divers will restabilize deteriorating concrete substructures and seal timber structures against rot. The work will also involve the demolition and removal of some concrete pile encasements both underwater and above the surface.
For particularly complicated or dangerous work, Marine Technologies will duplicate specific underwater settings at its Hawkins Point facility to allow divers to practice in a controlled environment, Clarke said.
Some of the port's oldest infrastructure rose from the ashes of what came before it.
A great rebuilding of Baltimore's waterfront, including downtown, began shortly after the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904, and later dockside blazes, such as one that ravaged Locust Point's piers in 1922, also helped shape the port's foundation.
The state's responsibility to maintain and replace such infrastructure dates back decades as well, in part to the 1950s and 1960s, when the need to open Baltimore's waterfront berths to more diverse trade partners convinced the state of the need to purchase piers that had long been controlled by the Baltimore & Ohio and other railroad companies.
"The railroads were not putting money back into the port," said Helen Delich Bentley, a former congresswoman and current adviser to the port administration. "I remember, particularly at Locust Point, the B&O absolutely would not do anything to allow trucks to load at the Locust Point piers."
The port's substructure today is in "pretty good shape" thanks to maintenance by the state and private terminal operators, Bentley said, though some parts of the city's waterfront that have fallen into disuse — including along South Clinton Street — have deteriorated, still bearing the scars of long-ago fires.
"It's ugly as hell, but it's so expensive to remove that stuff, and I guess nobody has felt the pressure or the need for the space," Bentley said. "To clean up what I know right now about the waterfront, it would probably be damn close to $50 million."
Without an industrial use lined up for such stretches, such a wholesale cleanup isn't likely, she said. But the state will continue to keep an eye on the port perimeter and any substructures that threaten to collapse into the water.
"They have to make sure that this stuff doesn't float out into the middle of the channel and do a lot of damage," Bentley said. "It's work that must be done."
Baltimore Sun research librarian Paul McCardell contributed to this article.
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