Nearly ready to stir up some sand

JC company will be soon have five dredges ready to sweep long stretch of river

The sand dredge Kathy Lee sits moored to the north bank of the Missouri River.
The sand dredge Kathy Lee sits moored to the north bank of the Missouri River.

Capital Sand Co. is rebuilding a sand dredge for its Jefferson City location to replace a dredge that capsized in the Missouri River in July 2015.

The "Kathy Lee" is expected to be complete this month. It will bring Capital Sand's operational dredges back to five in total, with one on the Osage River and four along the Missouri River.

"We're hoping this will be our most efficient and highest production sand dredge in our inventory," Capital Sand President Steve Bohlken said. "Because dredges are the beginning of the production cycle, efficiency is very important for meeting customer demand. We've learned from our previous dredge builds and repairs and have applied that experience to this latest rebuild of the 'Kathy Lee.'"

Company officials said the diesel-powered dredge is fitted with a special residential quiet muffler. It uses a hydraulic cutter head and is expected to mine between 800-1,000 tons of sand per hour. Two full-time employees, an operator and a deck hand, will operate the machine.

At the time of the capsizing, Farmer Holding Company Vice President Kirk Farmer said the dredge was fine the evening before but somehow started taking on water and had fallen on its side when they found it the next morning.

No one was hurt in the accident.

The dredge was alone in the water when it rolled over and no barge was involved, so there was no sand dumped back into the river.

The company had to create a plan to remove the dredge from the river with the Coast Guard's approval. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the insurance company, INU, were also involved.

Once the plan was approved, the insurer brought in a contractor to remove the dredge from the river.

Due to the total loss of the original dredge, Capital Sand had to outsource some production to continue to meet demand.

"The Kathy Lee will be an extremely efficient dredge and should help meet demand for construction aggregates in Central Missouri for the foreseeable future," Farmer said.

Capital Sand has operations all along the river, from Washington up to Lexington, and the company recently opened a small facility in Kansas City.

"The Jefferson City plant does jobs stretching from Branson up to Moberly," Bohlken said. "The sand is used for concrete and ready mix, asphalt, masonry and landscaping."

Bohlken also said one of their biggest customer bases is golf courses.

"It's used in green construction, and I'd say 65-70 golf courses use sand that comes from our Jefferson City operation," he said. "It takes 8,000 tons of sand just to do greens on one golf course."

If the temperature dips below 20 degrees, Bohlken said, they'll have to shut down the dredges because of the possibility of equipment freezing.

"We can keep working into the 30s, and this winter with temperatures getting into the 70s our guys were itching to work," he said. 

"We do a lot of preventive maintenance in the winter because the sand and water are very abrasive to our equipment."

Bohlken said the Corps of Engineers allows only a certain tonnage to be collected per 5-mile stretch of the river.