Confronted with an engineering report that cited “concern for potential failure of the ramp,” the borough on Thursday evening, March 13, notified freight haulers that the municipally owned barge ramp downtown was closed, immediately.
The borough made arrangements for the weekly freight barge to use the old sawmill dock at The Marine Service Center as a temporary unloading and loading site, Borough Manager Mason Villarma said Friday, March 14.
“This should have happened some time ago,” he said of shutting down the 47-year-old steel ramp which suffers from significant corrosion and structural issues, according to the engineering inspection and report.
“This is a safety decision,” Villarma said of the shutdown order.
“That sag in the middle, that was the most telling to me,” he said of the 140-foot-long steel ramp that extends out from shore and floats with the tide to enable forklifts to unload and load barges tied up at the moorings.
The inspection report by PND Engineers, of Juneau, noted that “typically, bridges of this length are fabricated with a positive camber,” a bow upward, of two to three inches, but the Wrangell barge ramp has bent under the weight of years of use and shows a “negative camber of slightly over one inch,” meaning it is bowing downward.
“The current overall condition of the barge ramp is poor,” the report stated. It’s age, “the elements and the inherent nature of freight-handling operations have all continued to contribute to significant deterioration. Protective coatings for the structural steel are either completely gone or in poor condition, causing significant corrosion of the steel. In addition, the profile of the barge ramp indicates it is bent, likely due to being overloaded.”
Repairing or rebuilding the barge facility is one option, Villarma said, as is proceeding with the borough’s long-term preference to move the operation to the former sawmill property at 6-Mile, which the borough purchased for $2.5 million in 2022 for its industrial development potential.
Another option could be driving more sheet piles at The Marine Service Center to expand the face of the dock, pouring in fill and expanding the area for barge operations, he said.
Building an entirely new facility at 6-Mile was estimated three years ago at about $18 million. The borough does not have any cost estimates for an expansion at The Marine Service Center or rebuilding the existing facility on the downtown waterfront.
Villarma said borough officials are scheduled for a video meeting Friday, March 21, to discuss short-term and longer-term options with representatives of the two companies that use the barge landing: Alaska Marine Lines and Samson Tug & Barge.
Alaska Marine Lines, which moves freight to Southeast from its base in Seattle, stops first in Ketchikan and offloads from its mainline northbound voyage cargo destined for Wrangell and Prince of Wales Island and transfers the vans, flatbeds and other items to a different barge for shuttle service to the smaller communities.
“We were notified last night that we can no longer operate at the Wrangell barge ramp due to structural issues,” Don Reid, president of AML, said in a statement the afternoon after the borough’s closure notice.
“We are working with Samson and the borough of Wrangell to find a short-term and a long-term solution to determine if and how we can service Wrangell,” Reid said.
The borough has added additional lighting and cleared a larger open area at the Marine Service dock to improve the facility for use by freight barges, which often come in at night.
Rather than directly haul freight vans over the barge ramp, unloading and loading cargo at The Marine Service Center dock involves putting one forklift on the barge to lift and hand off the containers to another forklift on the dock, Villarma explained.
The deteriorating barge ramp is not a new issue for the borough.
A 2011 condition assessment by PND Engineers estimated the ramp had 10 to 15 years of useful life remaining before it may no longer be considered safe to use, Port Director Steve Miller wrote in a 2021 report to the port commission when the borough was contracting for repairs to the flotation tank at the end of the ramp.
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