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Mexico Beach christens canal dredge
(Excerpted from The News Herald)
February 1, 2001
 (Photo:
Donald Barfield has just finished touching up the paint on the
bottom of a new dredge for the canal in Mexico Beach on Wednesday.
The dredge was christened at a ceremony at the municipal park.)
KEVIN PORTER
The News Herald
If the Mexico Beach Municipal Canal truly is the
lifeblood of the sleepy coastal town like many suggest, a dredge
that keeps it open allowing water to flow in and out would have to
be the heart of the city.
On Wednesday, the City of Mexico Beach got a
$200,000 transplant.
"I'm not going to say this is inclement
weather," said Mayor Kathy Kingsland, referring to overcast
skies above Canal Park and sprinkling rain. "The angels in
heaven are crying because we finally got a new dredge."
The City of Mexico Beach has maintained the passage
to and from the Gulf of Mexico since 1984 with an almost
half-century old, hand-me-down dredge from MacDill Air Force Base
near Tampa.
But rising costs of maintenance for the antique
piece of equipment prompted the City of Mexico Beach and the Mexico
Beach Community Development Council to retire "Old Big
Red" recently. It's replacement - yet to be named - was
christened in front of a moderate crowd Wednesday with a bottle of
Grandial champagne courtesy of Kingsland and then slowly lowered by
a crane into the canal where it will operate.
"This canal is extremely important, not just to
the people who live on it, but the economy all the way down to Port
St. Joe," said Chuck Guilford, owner of the Blue Water Inn,
owner a charter boat docked on the canal and a former mayor.
"If this canal was closed, Mexico Beach would become another
Lanark Village (a retirement area near Carrabelle)."
The canal provides boat owners a way into protected
waters and an entrance into the Gulf of Mexico. But the mouth of the
canal sits just east of a jetty and currents in the area fill the
canal's opening with sand.
Depending on the weather, it may need to be dredged
a couple of times a month or a couple of times a week.
The Mexico Beach CDC began assisting the City of
Mexico Beach in 1998 with maintenance of the dredge and canal
through the use of bed tax dollars.
The city purchased the new dredge from Innovative
Material Systems Inc., of Kansas, and the CDC will reimburse the
city over a 15-year period.
"It's going to be much more effective,"
said J. Patrick Howard, president of the CDC. "It will end up
costing less annually to maintain the canal (because repair costs
will be a thing of the past)."
Unlike the old dredge, the new machine can propel
itself through the water. Along with a suction device, it also has a
grinding mechanism to make the process smoother and faster.
The writer can be contacted at kporter@pcnh.com
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