Saltie BBC Kwiatkowski aground in Seaway
The cargo ship BBC Kwiatkowski ran aground Sunday afternoon off Montreal-East. Tuesday morning, December 20, she had not yet been refloated. She is on the south side of the St. Lawrence River near Dufault Island, part of the Îles de Boucherville. She was en route to Antwerp, Belgium from Port Colborne but with a stopover in Montreal. On the scene this morning was the tug Ocean Pierre Julien.
Rene Beauchamp
Toledo port board awards $9.6M in contracts for new liquids depot
Construction of a new facility for storing and transferring bulk liquids at the Port of Toledo is slated to start in the spring after the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority’s board of directors awarded two contracts totaling nearly $10 million Thursday morning.
Under the larger of the two, Industrial Power Systems, Inc., of Rossford, will be paid $6,386,717 to prepare the site, build foundations, detention basins, and pipe racks, grade and install railroad spurs, and install fire-suppression systems and utilities. Nooter Toledo, meanwhile, received a $3,200,185 contract for building the pipes used for handling products and for vapor control, installation of power, communication, and lighting systems, and other mechanical and electrical work.
The winning bid from Industrial Power Systems was the lower of two the port authority received for that contract, and the Nooter bid was the lowest of three. Both came in slightly below engineers’ estimates for construction cost.
Brian Perz, the port authority’s director of facilities and development services, said he expected contract documents to be signed in January, followed by springtime construction. The work will take “all of 2023 for sure, if not into ’24,” he said.
The facility will have a single, 2.1-million-gallon tank, which will be provided by Midwest Terminals of Toledo International, which operates the general-cargo dock under a port authority contract.
The facility will add a new dimension to cargo-handling capability at the port authority’s general-cargo dock near the Maumee River’s mouth, which historically has handled mainly metals, dry-bulk commodities such as sugar and petroleum coke, machinery and industrial components, including wind-turbine towers, and a smattering of other cargoes like imported lumber.
Among the more common liquid bulk commodities shipped on the Great Lakes are petroleum products and liquid fertilizers. Joe Cappel, the port authority’s vice president for business development, said the new facility will not be dedicated to any particular product.
“The tank will be versatile enough to handle a wide range of liquid products that are transported in bulk,” he said. “Liquid bulk products can be transloaded from rail cars, trucks, and barges through this tank.”
The facility’s construction is part of more than $20 million in improvements the port authority is making at the dock, funded almost entirely with federal and state grants. Already underway is the reconstruction of its dock face and adjoining surface, including replacement of on-dock railroad tracks and removal of the rails once used by the facility’s traveling cranes, which have since been replaced with mobile cranes.
Toledo Blade
