***UPDATE: Phoenix Offshore Mining still has some items left to recover from the bottom of the Nome Harbor. Harbormaster Lucas Stotts says the best case scenario was for Phoenix Marine to have all items and The Eddie back onshore by the end of Thursday, however the recovery process is still ongoing.***
It’s been two weeks since a barge owned by Phoenix Offshore Mining was dislodged in Nome’s harbor and ran aground. The recovery process is still ongoing to remove The Eddie from the water and store it onshore for the winter.
Harbormaster Lucas Stotts says on November 16th, high waves and improper preparation caused the resulting damage.
“The only issue, and how this problem all arose, was the jack-up barge was not elevated to the height that was actually needed. The forecast had called for a certain level of sea rise and wave height, and we actually experienced a significantly larger sea level rise as well as about twice the predicted wave height. So that was the issue and why it was dislodged, causing damage to the spuds and tipping everything over,” explained Stotts.
With more sea ice forming every day, a freeze-up of Nome’s harbor is inevitable, but Stotts said yesterday that Phoenix Marine’s plan is to have The Eddie and all items recovered today.
“They (Phoenix Marine) know the location of all items, they’ve already had a diver down last week to put eyes on everything. They just now need to have the rigging crew go down, locate everything, and actually hook rigging to it,” said Stotts. “I’m hopeful that we’ll have some of those items picked today (Tuesday) and then the rest picked tomorrow (Wednesday).”
Once The Eddie and all other items are removed from the harbor, Stotts says a survey of the ocean floor will still be required to insure nothing is left behind that could cause problems in the spring.
“There’s various different methods. The most typical would be to put a boat in the water that has a side skin sonar of some kind, and physically, you look at the bottom and insure that our water depth is maintained at twenty-two or twenty-two-and-a-half feet. So we receive both pre-dredge and post dredge surveys every year from the Corp, so we know what the floor looked like prior to this incident, and we just need to insure that it’s still the same,” stated Stotts.
Phoenix Offshore Mining, also referred to as Phoenix Marine, has multiple divers, various equipment like a grove-wheel crane, and its CEO, John Keeley, in town for the recovery process. The total cost of the operation is not known, and Keeley could not be reached for comment.
