GIANT VACUUM CLEARS HARBOUR BED

Wanganui Chronicle, 26 July 1949, Page 6

GIANT VACUUM CLEARS HARBOUR BED

New York Harbour claims to have the only “vacuum cleaner’’ in the world equipped with radar and a direction Under. The “cleaner’’ is the spotless new 10,000-ton U.S. Army dredge, Goethals, which cleans the floor of the harbour day and night from Monday to Friday. Anything on the botton comes up when the Goethals passes over. Two huge fans in the ship’s innards suck 120,000 gallons of water a minute through tubular steel attachments 90 feet long. Along with the water comes mud, sand, rocks and various items that people have been dropping in the world's busiest harbour since Giovanni Da Verrazano discovered it in 1524. Boulders .weighing as much as 200 pounds, scraps of marine hardware, and fragments of old shipwrecks are whisked into the Goethals with the | same abandon household vacuums exercise with strap hairpins and collar buttons. At times, the crop also includes revolvers, sawed-off shotguns, brass knuckles and daggers confiscated and dumped by city police. TAKES 7000 TONS. The water pours back into the harbour, but the rocks and debris end up in 16 bins in the Goethals’ hold. Heavy iron doors on the undersides of these bins hold up to 7000 tons. When the seagoing vacuum’s load attains that size, the Goethals steams out to the outer harbour and discharges its load into deep water. Just as string winds around the brush of a vacuum cleaner, so lengths of heavy steel hawser, or even chain, sometimes entangle the blades of the suction fans on the Goethals. When a drag tender suspects this trouble, he shuts down the motors, and sometimes crew men (100 of them work in three shifts), must crawl in with axes and acetylene torches to cut away the obstruction. Although the fan blades and their casings are of heavy steel, they take such a terrific beating that they must be replaced every year or so. A three-inch casing may be only a half-inch thick in spots when removed.