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Author: Kerry Solan
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  • December

    A crew of 16 people stand in front of the dredge vessel, the Yaquina.

    ‘Man Overboard’: Dredge vessel crew saves woman swept away by Columbia River

    It was the sound – something like a scream – that first caught their attention.

  • June

    The Essayons travelled north to the Corps’ Alaska District, to dredge the Cook Inlet Navigation Channel. A sudden surge of shoal material in the past two years reduced depths and affected navigation in the channel, which is the only Coast Guard marked route for all cargo and fuel ships supplying the Port of Anchorage.

    Big Bertha heads to Benson Beach, battles erosion

    Off the coast of Oregon, Big Bertha moves in the water, inching toward land. Bertha, as her government creators to refer to it, is the result of three years of inter-agency planning. Her architects; some of whom work for the Portland District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; conscripted half of Portland District’s dredge fleet to scrape the river bottom and collect what was to become Bertha: a migrating mound of sand.

  • December

    Headshot of a man with a short beard. He is wearing glasses, a light-gray suit, baby-blue shirt and dark tie.

    Hydropower to the people: Mathematician brings energy to new position

    In the wet world of hydropower, a former math teacher has just donned a watery mantle to meet the changing demands of one of the oldest sources of energy.

  • September

    A look inside the the cracks and damage to the concrete sill exposed and broken rebar inside the navigation lock's concrete.

    The Anatomy of an Outage: A Look Back at Bonneville Navigation Lock's Sill Failure

    On Sept. 5, 2019, a long unknown and undetected flaw became an impending failure at Bonneville navigation lock. More than 70 feet underwater, sections of rebar, threaded through 40,000 pounds of concrete, had stretched and bent until the strain snapped them. The now deformed steel bars were no match for the force of water that came every time the lock filled with water to pass vessels through the lock.
  • A photo of security camera footage of the Beachie Fire approaching Detroit Dam.

    The longest shift: dam operator trapped at Detroit Dam during wildfires

    Before leaving for his work shift, Mike Pomeroy said goodbye to his wife, Ronda, the way he always did: with a promise. “I’ll see you in 14.” The powerplant operator then made the drive for his shift at Detroit Dam that Labor Day evening, in “red flag” conditions as the Beachie Fire consumed swaths of land to the northeast.

  • July

    A woman poses in a grassy field with two large dogs. A snowy mountain is in the background.

    Fate and flows: Oregon native keeps water moving through state

    PORTLAND, Ore. -- Salina Hart dreams about water. It makes sense: she grew up on the water, and often went tubing down the local Clackamas River, the North Santiam and the Long Tom. Even after the massive local floods of 1996 swelled the river, inundated her home and took out most of her neighborhood, she still loved water.

  • June

    A woman in a hard hat holds a baby in a bonnet near Bonneville Dam.

    Employee’s hustle during navigation lock outage leads to agency-level win

    The task: manage your first emergency contract to repair some broken concrete that has brought a stand-still to $24 billion worth of annual commerce moving on the Columbia River while battling morning sickness.