What we have here is a visual record of a truly astounding bit of luck on the part of the Captain of one medium-sized towboat -- as they are called, even though they push.

These pics were purloined from another website and are here only temporarily ... so that some associates not yet lucky enough to have seen the sequence before it was (also temporarily?) pulled because of the overload it placed on two consecutive servers. They were unattributed and, I assume, are in the public domain.

The story came to me about 96th hand, so take it with a pound of salt: Apparently this all happened a couple of decades ago. The tow Capt, seeing that he would not be able to make the opening span with the barges, released them to glide on their own beneath a lower, non-opening span of the bridge. He was no doubt intending to go through the open span and pick them up on the other side. They did their part. He didn't.

My theory is that he must have lost power and could not hold back his towboat against the current to await a full opening of the bridge, a likely scenario since if you look in the third picture, there is no boiling propwash coming up around the sides of the boat as he is almost upon the partially open bridge. [And, believe me, those babies can stir up some water -- I used to live on the Mississippi and saw them all the time, occassionally with as many as 40 barges in the "tow." This guy only has two.If I remember my river lore correctly, a towboat the size of the one in question -- *not* the largest around -- has something like 10,000 hp avaialable. Note, in one of the last pics, the smoke from the stack and the propwash as he apparently got the diesels restarted.]

The upshot of the whole thing is that the boat was OK and is still in service. They probably just hosed it out, restocked the galley, and replaced the crew's underwear. :-)

wgc

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