Ship Island is, for the moment, actually two islands. The sand will travel through almost five miles (eight kilometers) of pipe before it is finally blasted onto the shore of Ship Island. The ship’s pumps kick in again, pulling slurry back out of the hopper and shooting it down a mile of pipe to a floating booster station, where more pumps will usher it along. They connect the serpent to a pipe leading from the hopper. Crew members get a rope around the serpent’s head and winch it out of the water. An assembly that looks like an eyeless robotic sea serpent bobs in the waves. An hour or so later, the Ellis Island drops anchor several miles offshore, in water deep enough for its 30-foot draft. Once that is done, enormous winches haul up the drag heads, and the ship sets course toward the mainland. It takes several hours for the hopper to fill with slurry. Their metal bulk towers over a maze of catwalks and pipes that surround the hopper. Twin yellow cranes perch on either side of the deck. His ship is 433 feet (132 meters) long-a good bit longer than an American football field and about half the length of an aircraft carrier. “We call ourselves dirt merchants,” Gabriel Cuebas, the Ellis Island’s captain, told me when I visited on a hot October day. The pumps suck slurry into the hopper, which slowly fills with roiling gray soup, speckled with muculent, softball-size bubbles.
Twin pipes, each three feet (90 centimeters) in diameter, connect the drag heads to giant pumps on the ship’s deck. It is hauling a pair of 30-ton drag heads, studded with steel teeth, which scrape along the sandy sea bottom. The ship is gargantuan-the biggest such dredge ever built in the United States. Every three seconds, another truckload’s worth of salt water and sand, siphoned from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, pours into the Ellis Island’s vast, open cargo hold, called a hopper.
#Dredge vessel torrent#
Fifteen miles out on the water south of Biloxi, Mississippi, below a cloudless sky, a foaming torrent of gray-black slurry gushes into a ship.
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