Successful night shift at the Geestebarrage
Washing up is not necessarily one of the favorite chores of all household members - at bremenports, things are a little different: Here, washing up is a passion, even at night if necessary - albeit on a slightly different scale: at the end of last year, bremenports divers discovered during a routine inspection that peaty, solidified silt had collected around the stem gates of the Geestesperrwerk, which could no longer be flushed away by hand using a flushing lance. At short notice, therefore, the “big equipment” - the workboat “Hol blank” with its water injection device - was deployed in December.
At that time, however, the operation had to be canceled at the last minute due to excessive wind load, which prevented the Kennedy Bridge from being folded up as required for flushing.
However, the night-time operation of the 10-strong bremenports team on the Hol Blank went smoothly on Tuesday night, and not just in terms of the weather: after the bridge was raised at 11.30 p.m. for around 20 minutes to allow the workboat to pass and then lowered again, the crew on the other side of the bridge were already preparing for a special kind of rinsing operation. At 2.30 a.m., it was once again “bridge up” and over the next two hours, the jetty area of the barrier - the threshold under the gates, so to speak - was rinsed in order to loosen the silt in the water so that the sediment could then be carried back towards the North Sea by the Weser itself as the water drained away. At the same time, part of the team set about carrying out minor routine work on the bridge itself and replacing some bolts on the plates between the bridge sections. At 4.30 a.m., the bridge was finally lowered again as planned after the successful night-time operation and opened to road traffic.
“In view of the storm surge season ahead of us, we simply want to be as well prepared as possible and, by flushing the bridge, ensure that the barrier can do its job in an emergency without any problems caused by too much silt around the gates,” reported Udo Skeraitis, Team Leader Plant Operations at bremenports, in the run-up to the operation. There were two reasons why the time of night was chosen: Due to the tidal conditions and to minimize the impact on traffic over the Kennedy Bridge, the night was simply the best time window.
