The state Department of Environmental Management just evicted someone who really deserved it. Since 2017 a derelict crane-topped barge has been sunk in the Providence River off Public Street. The barge presented a navigational hazard and ecological concerns — and has been a serious eyesore for the waterfront. Thanks to a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the barge is finally out of the river, and its metal will be reused for something good. ecoRI News reporter and Blab Lab host Rob Smith and reporter Colleen Cronin sit down with DEM director Terry Gray to talk about the years-long odyssey.

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This transcript was edited for clarity and length.

Rob Smith 

Terry, thanks for joining us on the podcast today.

Terry Gray

Hey, good afternoon Rob.

Rob Smith

So, what is this thing that’s in the river and why is it there right now?

Terry Gray 

That’s actually a long story in itself, but what the thing that’s in the river is an old construction barge, and it had a crane on it, and it was owned by a gentleman that that really kind of brought it around to different places and parked it at different docks around the Providence River, really, without permission in a lot of ways. And he ended up bringing it over to Public Street as he was moving around, and it sank.

Rob Smith

Was it a storm or … what sank it?

Terry Gray 

I think it was just lack of maintenance, lack of upkeep, and it was just time, and it went down.

Colleen Cronin

It had seen better days!

Terry Gray
So, now it was sitting in the water at the end of Public Street, and really was an eyesore, and we had concerns about any hazardous material, oil, chemicals, that kind of thing that might have been on the barge, as well as what you mentioned, which was, was it going to present a hazard to navigation? So, both of those things were investigated. We didn’t find any oil or hazardous materials on the vessel, and it was determined and it was not a hazard to navigation, which was actually too bad, because it sounds funny, but if we had found either one of those conditions that existed at that time, we would have opened up a pretty much guaranteed funding source to be able to remove the barge right then.

Rob Smith 

So, the good news is there was no real problem. It just looked ugly. The bad news is there wasn’t enough bad news to do anything about it.

Terry Gray 

Exactly so. So, in that case, we went back to the tried and true philosophy of making the polluter pay, and we issued notice of violation against the owner of the barge, essentially for depositing solid waste in a waterway, and it was kind of a novel interpretation for a sinking vessel, but that’s what happened, right? So, we took this action against the owner. He appealed it, and it was going through the appeal process when he passed away.

Rob Smith

Oh, OK.

Terry Gray

After he passed away, we looked at assets, estates, any kind of lingering value that might have supported the removal and essentially the cupboard was bare. There was nothing there. So, now it was truly abandoned and sitting at the end of Public Street as a big, giant eyesore.

Rob Smith 

So it’s been a long, strange trip for this vessel. What’s the process to secure funding been like? I know you’ve got the federal grant, but if I remember correctly, there was at least one attempt to get money from the state budget for it, and that didn’t shake out. And this is probably five or six years ago now.

Terry Gray

So, we actually have something called the abandoned vessel fund.

Colleen Cronin

Interesting!

Terry Gray

Yeah, there’s always something like that, and it’s funded through boat registrations. A little tiny bit of boat registrations go into this, and it’s not a big fund. Usually it caps out at a couple of thousand in terms of funding that’s available. And most of the time, it’s used for very small vessels, recreational vessels, very small fishing vessels, that kind of stuff.

Colleen Cronin

Can I ask? How big this barge is, like, feet wise?

Rob Smith

Yeah, how much? How big is it? Because I think in the release it says 400,000 pounds of metal or something.

Terry Gray 

It’s big. I don’t know the exact dimension. I could get those for you, but …

Colleen Cronin 

It’s pretty big, bigger than a big center-console fishing boat.

Terry Gray

Yeah, it’s pretty large.

Rob Smith 

So what’s the funding process been like, I think there were a couple attempts to get money from the state budget out of it. You were talking about the derelict vessel fund?

Colleen Cronin

Abandoned vessel fund, right?

Terry Gray

So, we looked at that fund, and that fund is actually controlled by a board. So, we were laying the groundwork with the board to basically empty the account, to remove this vessel, and there was a little bit of discomfort over that, because we’d go down to a zero balance, and we wouldn’t have the ability to respond to anything else for a while, until it built back up. We actually went through some contracting. We had a tentative selection for a contractor to remove the vessel a few years ago. But the methodologies that they were proposing were based on this technology called guillotining.

Colleen Cronin

That’s terrifying!

Terry Gray

It is terrifying. And what they would have done is basically used another big piece of metal to chop the barge into pieces and then pull the smaller pieces out of the water. Well, CRMC really didn’t like that. They were uncomfortable with that because, primarily because it really has a high potential of spreading debris all over the place, and then you get the big pieces out, but then there’s small pieces left in the water, and it’s something that they were concerned about. So, in order to remove the barge, we needed a permit, and we weren’t going to get a permit for that methodology. So, in a lot of ways, it was back to the drawing board. Ironically, in the meantime, one of the properties at the end of Public Street was rented for salt storage, and there was a huge mountain of salt that now blocked the view, so you couldn’t see the barge anymore. So that took a little bit of the urgency away.

Rob Smith

So, you didn’t want to empty the state fund for taking the stuff out of the water.

Colleen Cronin 

The guillotine method wasn’t going to work

Rob Smith 

CRMC wasn’t going to get you a permit, and you know, for good or for ill, there’s a giant salt pile now blocking it for at least from the street side. How did you come to apply for a federal grant to take this out of the water?

Terry Gray 

Yeah, so, after we kind of hit that roadblock with the permitting issues and the funding issues, we went back to the drawing board, and one of the things we really did was sit down with CRMC and figure out the right approach to remove the vessel. And then we went through the contracting process again to get a vendor that could do this work. And we did that. And at the same time, we applied for a marine debris grant from NOAA, like you mentioned. And in order to really be competitive in the marine debris grant, it can’t just be chopping up and pulling an old barge out of the water. There’s got to be some community benefit that goes with that. So, a couple of things contributed to the success of that application: One was the fact that the city of Providence is planning some water access, for the community down there, down Public Street, and they had also received NOAA funding to do a shoreline survey to support that community access. So these two applications kind of complement each other. The other piece was that we reached out to The Steel Yard, and we talked to The Steel Yard about using some of the material from the barge as educational materials and to create some creative structures that really, not only told the story, but maybe told the connection of the water and something you could put down by the bay. We don’t know what they’re going to make out of these, out of the steel, but the idea is that they could train people to work with the steel and then have that messaging, really, I think, resonated in the grant application.

Rob Smith 

So with the federal money in hand, what’s the status for the barge today, and what is the current plan for taking it out?

Terry Gray 

So literally, it’s being removed as we speak. Ten days ago, they removed the crane off the top of it. So that was a big event.

Rob Smith 

And are they still just chopping it up and taking it out?

Terry Gray 

Yeah, in a much more controlled manner. You could argue that it’s a controlled guillotine.

Rob Smith

And, I mean, you can’t just, you know, hook it up to a tractor trailer and pull it, it’s no big thing. You have to take it apart.

Terry Gray 

You could not take it out with a crane, yeah, you could not take it out with an arm, with a tow, like you said. And remember, this thing’s been in the water and the mud for 10 years. So, the structural integrity of the vessel really isn’t that good. So, it’s going to come apart when you take it apart. So, it’s being done in a very controlled manner.

Rob Smith 

I want to go back to the party responsible for the barge being there for a second. I know you said you were looking at the estate when he passed away, but prior to the owner passing away, did DEM issue any fines or penalties or violations for leaving this barge in the water?

Terry Gray

Yeah, there was a violation, and I believe there was a small penalty involved too, but really our objective was to get it out of there and we were hoping that he would take responsibility for the removal.

Rob Smith 

We’re all talking about the federal freeze that was announced last week and all the uncertainty. Is this NOAA grant in jeopardy at all currently from the current administration’s attempts to freeze or claw back federal funding?

Terry Gray 

Yeah, Rob, the key word in your question is uncertainty. I think we’re looking at that daily, and the risks of our various grants are really unclear at this point. So this is not one that seems to be on the front burner of some of the president’s executive orders from last week, but you never know. And we’re being cautious. We’re moving forward business as usual and we still have access to the grant funds, so we’re drawing those down as we incur expenses.

Rob Smith 

Will there be anything left to clean up after it’s gone? Is there anything left to monitor that people should look out for once this project is done?

Terry Gray 

No, the good news goes back to the beginning, which was there was no oil or hazardous materials or other pollutants on the barge. It was all kind of a physical debris problem. And the contractor is tasked with removing the barge, removing any debris that falls off of it, either before or during the demo process. So, when all is said and done, it’s just not going to be there anymore.

Rob Smith 

Is all of the metal going to The Steel Yard, or is some of it just going to a scrap yard, or anywhere else?

Terry Gray 

Portions of it are going to The Steel Yard. It’s a big boat, and I don’t think they were prepared to truck it down Sims Ave. and take the whole thing on at once. So, we’re taking some of the big metal plates, some of the pieces of the crane, some of the pieces that they can work with.

Rob Smith 

I know you touched on it a little bit. This isn’t really something we usually see in Narragansett, Bay or the Providence River. Are there any other derelict vessels or other large pieces of marine debris that the department has its eye on similar to this?

Terry Gray 

Not really, nothing like this. I mean, we have the regular vessels that wash up every once in a while, loose docks, pieces like that. And that’s part of the general process of dealing with derelict vessels. So there’s no other big smoking gun out there that we need to go after next. There are vessels that our program deals with. A lot of them do come in through our environmental police. So they’re out there on the water. They’re seeing incidents all the time, some of which lead to the destruction of the vessels themselves. And sometimes we need to step in and help deal with that stuff.

Rob Smith 

Do you know the last time the department had to deal with something this big in the water?

Terry Gray 

I don’t think we’ve ever done that.

Rob Smith

Oh, wow.

Colleen Cronin 

I was going to ask, I have two questions that might not make it into the final cut. But I grew up on the Cape and you used to be able to see the [USS] Pendleton [a tanker ship that broke in half off Cape Cod during a nor’easter in 1952 whose crew members were rescued by the Coast Guard; a movie called The Finest Hours was made about the rescue]. Do you remember? And are there any other, like, famous things like that, sticking up?

Terry Gray 

So there are vessels sunk throughout Narragansett Bay, and I grew up right off Gaspee Point in Warwick. And there was an old coal barge, it was a wooden barge that had sank right off of Narragansett, excuse me, off of Gaspee Point years ago. I don’t know when it did. I just remember as a little kid when it got to be low tide, you could see the ribs from this boat stick up. I know there was a lot of work in Warwick to also look for the Gaspee. And I don’t know if they ever found any evidence of it, but they were looking around to see if there were any remnants from that boat.

Colleen Cronin 

Oh, yes. This is when Rhode Island claims that they’re the start of the …

Rob Smith 

250 years ago. I think it probably …

Terry Gray 

It’s the first blow for freedom.

Colleen Cronin 

I’m from Massachusetts, so I’m of the you know, of the Boston Massacre frame of mind. Have you …

Rob Smith 

Have you ever been to Gaspee Day? It’s a fun time.

Colleen Cronin

No, I haven’t.

Rob Smith

Oh, it’s a fun time.

Colleen Cronin

Oh, well, Rhode Island bucket list.

Rob Smith

It’s a nice 5K to do, and then they give you a beer afterwards. And it’s just fun. The parade is so long, though, I swear.

Colleen Cronin 

Well, maybe if they find the Gaspee, we’ll do another episode about the environmental effects. My other question was, I know that there’s these rules about, like, if you come to a sinking vessel’s rescue, you get salvage rights or something like that. Was there ever any talk of trying to use that to …

Terry Gray 

I don’t think anybody wanted this.

Colleen Cronin

No, just thought I’d ask.

Rob Smith 

Is that true? Do you get salvage rights if you rescue the vessel? Is that true?

Colleen Cronin 

I think that that might be true, but …

Terry Gray 

I’ve only seen that in movies. Yeah, I don’t know if that’s real or not.

Colleen Cronin

OK, thank you, Terry, for answering all of our questions.

Rob Smith

Thanks for coming out.