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Questions about the status of the lock closure should be addressed to the Army Corps of Engineers Navigation Branch at 615-736-5607 or the Chickamauga lockmaster at 423-875-6230.
Work on the Chickamauga Lock has been halted for lack of funding.The Chickamauga lock should reopen next week, 10 days earlier than what engineers initially expected when they discovered a crack in the steel support to the upper gate of the lock on Monday.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers expects to be able to weld and shore up the cracked steel beam over the next several days and reopen the lock by Thursday. That will restore barge and boat traffic now halted on the Tennessee River in Chattanooga because of the problems in the 74-year-old lock.
"Barge operators and the industries they serve have been scrambling around trying to figure out how they would handle a three-week outage so getting this repaired by next week is absolutely great news," said Cline Jones, executive director for the Tennessee River Valley Association, a trade association for the barge industry. "But the fact that the lock shut down unexpectedly is still a real sign that we need to get this old lock replaced."
Brad Bishop, a civil engineer for the Corps Nashville District overseeing the lock repairs, said crews from the Corps and the Tennessee Valley Authority will work 12-hour shifts throughout the weekend to prepare and perform welding upgrades and other improvements for the upper gate.
"There is a large crack and it was evident that we had to shut down the lock," Bishop said Friday after the Corps completed its assessment and repair plan. "We determined today after getting it everything a part and taking a closer look that this is something that we can fix with extensive weld repair."
Lt. Col. John Hudson, commander of the Nashville District, was on site during the initial evaluation on Thursday and was pleased with the results of the inspection and the path forward.
"I am glad the problem was not as extensive as originally thought, and we believe we will be able to complete repairs this coming week and reopen Chickamauga Lock before next weekend," he said in a statement Friday evening.
Chickamauga Lock, which was built by TVA in the 1930s and opened in 1940 along with the Chickamauga Dam, is suffering from problems with "concrete growth" in its chamber walls. Bishop said such concrete growth causes the chamber walls to swell and damage the anchors to the gates. The lower gates were previously replaced, but earlier inspections of the upper gate didn't show any cracks or other problems.
The Corps has spent $186 million to build a bigger replacement lock at the Chickamauga Dam to replace the crumbling existing lock, which has been shored up with extra anchors and supports. Funding for the replacement lock ran out in 2010 after the $49 million from the 2009 federal stimulus program provided the last money for the project.
A new cost assessment of the new lock completed this summer, using a new risk-based approach, projects that the Corps will need to spend another $674 million to complete the replacement lock.
Some funding may be available for the Chickamauga project later in fiscal 2015, if higher priority projects don't absorb all of the available funds. Because the Chickamauga Lock handles the smallest amount of cargo shipments among the four lock projects under construction by the Corps - only about 1 million tons last year - Chickamauga has the lowest priority among the four ongoing lock construction projects.
The higher priority locks include, in order, the Olmsted Lock on the Ohio River, the Lower Monongahela Lock in Pennsylvania and the Kentucky Lock in western Kentucky.