When it came time to upgrade one of the two giant barge towers on Pigs Eye Lake operated by Gavilon Grain LLC, the company did something it hadn’t been required to do.
“We figured this was a good time to go the extra mile and make it as environmentally safe as possible,” said Rick Krause, manager of the facility that operated under several ownerships – Peavy and ConAgra – before becoming a division of Gavilon in 2008. Gavilon is in the Port Authority’s Red Rock River Terminal.
The Earth-friendly improvements include converting the 60-foot tower’s hydraulic operating mechanisms to an electrical system and replacing an old, open-style conveyor loader with an enclosed tube system.
“We were having problems with broken hydraulic lines and leakage, so converting to electricity is much cleaner,” Krause explained. “And we decided to go with the enclosed tube system so that no product could drop inadvertently into the lake.”
Unless you’re in a boat, it’s almost impossible to see the two Gavilon towers, which sit on concrete pads near the shore of the lake. But they are very busy operations during the shipping season, when they load hundreds of thousands of tons of grain onto barges destined for downstream shipping. The towers also load and off-load fertilizer, coal and other products, including 75,000 tons of road salt destined for winter use on Minnesota’s icy highways.
“We can load out about 500 tons an hour,” Krause said. “A typical barge holds 1,500 tons, so it takes three hours to load it. That’s the equivalent of 60 truckloads or 15 rail cars of product.”
The $1.5 million upgrade began at the end of December and is expected to be completed by March 15 in time for the start of the spring shipping season.
Krause, who has worked for the shipping operators for more than 35 years, says he’s a little surprised by the public interest in the improvements underway at the largely unseen facility. His career roughly coincides with the construction of the towers in the 1970s.
“We’re kind of back in our own little peninsula and we’re only seen from the river,” he said. “A few boaters come into the lake for fishing, but there’s not much traffic.
“To me, this is the kind of normal maintenance that makes sense,” Krause added. “But it’s good to let people know that an investment is being made on the river, aimed at keeping it up.”
