News Release
| Release Number: | 05-061 |
| Dated: | 5/6/2005 |
| Contact: | Matt Rabe, 503-808-4510 |
Portland, Ore. – The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Thursday moved forward in its commitment to provide safe and reliable navigation in the Columbia River.
The Corps awarded an $8,738,500 contract to Illinois-based Great Lake Dredge and Dock Co. to maintain the 103.5-mile-long, 40-foot-deep Columbia River federal navigation channel between the mouth and Vancouver, Wash., as well as the six-mile-long channel across the Columbia River bar. Great Lakes also will deepen by three feet a 13-mile section of the lower river near Astoria this summer.
The Corps expects the maintenance work to begin later this month.
The contract was awarded following two rounds of bidding. The initial bids for the combined work came in too high for the government to award a contract, so the Corps rejected the bids and repackaged the work, reducing the amount of work required. The second round resulted with bids within the government’s acceptable range.
The second round bids were: Great Lakes Dredge and Dock, $10,580,500; Manson Construction of Seattle, $11,771,500; and Bean Stuyvesant of New Orleans, $16, 322,150. The awarded contract is smaller than the bid because the Corps is delaying its decision to award some of the optional items within the package. Those optional items may be awarded later.
This will be the first deepening work under the Columbia River Channel Improvement Project. In 2004, the Corps initiated the construction phase of the project with the start and completion of an ecosystem restoration component of the project. Additional dredging, restoration and mitigation work will take place in the coming months and years.
The Columbia River Channel Improvement Project is a collaborative effort between the Corps and five lower river ports to improve navigation in the Columbia River by deepening the navigation channel to accommodate the current fleet of international bulk cargo and container ships. Currently, these ships cannot fill their holds to capacity due to depth limitations caused by the existing 40-foot channel. By deepening the river, ships will be better able to fully load, providing an estimated annual cost savings of $18.8 million to shippers.
The five ports are the ports of Portland and St. Helens in Oregon, and the ports of Vancouver, Woodland, Kalama and Longview in Washington.