Great Lakes Dredge & Dock wins safety award for Kansas project

(OAK BROOK, Ill.) — Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corp. has been named winner of the Western Dredging Association’s (WEDA) 2017 Annual Safety Excellence Award for a Dredging Project for the John Redmond Dredging Project performed by GLDD's Rivers and Lakes Division under contract to the Kansas Water Office.

WEDA’s annual Safety Excellence Awards are presented to organizations and project teams with exceptional safety performance in support of the WEDA Safety Commission’s goal of “raising the awareness of safety in the dredging workplace.” Thirteen organizations have received the award since its inception in 2008.

The John Redmond Dredging Project was a design/construct dredging contract that included the hydraulic dredging of 3 million cubic yards of material from the John Redmond Reservoir near Burlington, Kan., and pumped to five contractor-provided confined disposal facilities (CDFs). It was the first contract in the United States for a state to dredge on federal property. The CDFs included the design and construction of 41,350 lineal feet of dike using 775,000 cubic yards of compacted fill. Dredge material was excavated and pumped through five miles of pipeline placed over three existing gas pipelines, one river crossing, and five road crossings to the CDFs. The CDFs will eventually be returned to agricultural use.  

Great Lakes’ commitment to the state of Kansas was that its incident and injury-free safety culture would ultimately define its success on the project. With an 11-month construction period and more than 60,000 working man-hours on the project, GLDD met its commitment by completing the work with zero reported injuries, and also ahead of schedule, on budget, and with the highest quality standards.

By Professional Mariner Staff