Cleaning up

Alex Coolman

It’s early on a foggy morning and the engine of the dredging barge

sounds like a waking giant.

The Newport Harbor Yacht Club needs sand taken away from the area

around its slips. Dredge captain Eric Langenbach, his ears covered with

red sound protectors, maneuvers the barge slowly through the water,

sucking up sand.

On a nearby dock, Plazi Miller, vice president of the dredging company

Shellmaker Inc., stands watching, looking fairly satisfied.

Things aren’t exactly perfect in the dredging world, Miller said, but

they are better than they used to be.

In the spring, California Coastal Commission regulations brought

Newport Harbor dredging to a virtual standstill.

The city’s blanket permit for clearing out sand had expired, and the

harbor was quickly getting too shallow to navigate.

Today, it’s possible to dredge in some areas, and it’s possible to

dispose of the sand at sea.

“We’re booked solid,” Miller said. “We’ve got more dredging than we

can do. People that weren’t going to go to sea before [to dispose of

their dredge spoils] are going to sea now.”

That means regular work for Miller, Langenbach and guys like Joe

Murman.

Murman tends the barge that accumulates the silt and sand pulled off

the bottom by the dredger.

As he stands watching, hundreds of gallons of murky water pour through

a pipe into the barge, slowly adding to the load of material to be dumped

offshore.

“You find everything in the harbor,” Murman said. “Anything and

everything” -- including canvas boat covers, sunglasses, and countless

other bits of bottom-dwelling junk.

Murman’s job is to make sure the sand pouring into the barge settles

in a way that’s weighted evenly.

Sometimes it’s pretty quick work, with the barge filling up in the

neighborhood of five hours, and sometimes the sand is too silty, taking

two days to make a full load.

At the end, however, the result is the same.

The barge motors out to sea and drops its load, leaving Newport Beach

-- for better and for worse -- 200 cubic yards of sand lighter than it

was before.