Jan 10, 2025
As work pace goes, 2024 has been a banner year for TVA’s River Services team.
“On all our boats, it’s been extremely busy,” Shane Carman, TVA River Services manager, said.
Carman’s team oversees half a dozen TVA vessels on the Valley region’s river system, an aqueous highway for transporting loaded barges to critical projects and generating sites.
While three boats are permanently assigned to fossil plants, others tow equipment throughout the rivers. Some, for example, are currently at a massive transmission tower project in Trinity, Alabama, providing support to TVA’s transmission team.
“That’s the biggest project we’ve ever done,” Shane said. “We started in May and we’ve now got 40 TVA employees working from barges there in the river.”
This past spring, the team worked on a sizable project at a river lock near Pickwick Dam, and they were also riverside for work at Sequoyah and Watts Bar nuclear plants.
And in late September and early October, after floods from Hurricane Helene, River Services crews were instrumental in containing flood debris at Douglas Dam.
Looking back, this team’s steady rhythm for 2024 was set in motion on a frigid morning in mid-January.
It began with an unexpected phone call.
It would launch TVA’s flagship vessel, Mv. Freedom, on an emergency journey to help a sister agency in Alabama.
‘No Time to Talk’
Shane’s phone rang at 10 a.m. Jan. 17, around the time temperatures plummeted and TVA logged record highs in energy demand.
He didn’t recognize the number, but he answered anyway.
The caller’s voice had an urgency. He identified himself as a member of the Army Corps of Engineers district in Mobile, Alabama, and said, “Hang on, I need to patch you in with some other people.”
“What about?” Shane asked.
“No time to talk,” he said. “I have to get you on a call.”
He soon connected to an Army Corps of Engineers team in Mobile. Shane was no stranger to this group – employees from both organizations have networked about shared capabilities.
“That’s what’s neat about planting seeds,” Vern Gwin, chief of operations with the Army Corps’ Mobile district, said. “We had met up in May (of 2023) …and had a great meeting.”
The Army Corps team toured TVA’s Wilson Dam on that visit, then traded contacts with TVA folks.
They all agreed to stay in touch.
“And so now, here we were, having an emergency,” Vern said.
A portion of a concrete miter sill in the Demopolis lock – located on the Tombigbee River, near the Black Warrior River in west-central Alabama – had fractured, allowing water to gush freely beneath the lock’s gates.
Built in the 1950s, Demopolis lock is a critical tool in managing river traffic along the Black Warrior River, the Tombigbee River and the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, often referred to as the Tenn-Tom. A shutdown in traffic could mean significant losses for commercial vessels.
“It’s one of our busiest locks,” Vern said.
To repair the lock and dodge extensive damage, the Army Corps needed to quickly stop the flow of water. And for that, they’d need at least seven concrete stoplogs, each weighing up to 60,000 pounds.
The problem? Their vessels were undergoing routine maintenance. They needed a towboat that could deliver the materials in short order.
Shane sized up the situation. His crew members don’t often travel the Tombigbee River – it’s due south of TVA’s service area – and most of them were at their homes, blanketed under ice and snow.
He asked Vern to send him an email summarizing the emergency.
“Next thing I know,” Vern said, “he sends me an email and says, ‘We’re coming.’”