BY WES STARRATT
Published: May, 2011
For over 100 years, the Dutra companies have been building and maintaining the vital levees in California’s Delta, through which much of California’s water flows en route from the snow-capped Sierras to the Pacific Ocean—with stops along the way to irrigate the state’s thirsty farmland and its thriving cities.
Today, the Dutra Group is headquarted in San Rafael. It consists of three companies: Dutra Dredging, Dutra Construction and Dutra Materials. The company’s dredging and construction projects stretch all the way from Alaska’s Aleutian Islands to the Columbia River, the Port of Los Angeles and the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile, Dutra Materials is largely involved in the operation of the San Rafael Rock Quarry, which supplies much of the rock used for maintaining the Delta levees.
The Delta town of Rio Vista is the original homestead of the Dutra family, and much of Dutra’s present-day fleet is still based there, as one can see from the many vessels docked for miles along the Sacramento River in the Rio Vista area. This month, my focus is on Dutra’s dredging fleet—one of the largest in California—which includes a broad range of dredges, tugs, scows, and barges. The fleet is maintained by the modern facilities that Dutra has built along the river in Rio Vista.
As I approached Rio Vista, I noticed the Rio Vista Lift Bridge and its towers that were added in 1960 to raise the bridge and facilitate ship traffic to and from the Port of Sacramento. Once across the bridge, I followed a river road lined with an assortment of boats and barges from Dutra’s fleet until I reached a complex of modern steel buildings and riverside docking facilities known as the Oly Ramp Yard.
There I was met by Steve Lee, manager of Dutra’s Equipment Division, who said, “Dutra has the largest dredging fleet in the Delta and certainly one of the largest in California.” In an earlier interview, company president Bill Dutra said, “Our barge fleet is spread out from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico, but the primary rock-carrying fleet remains in Rio Vista. We have approximately 30 barges, ranging from rock- and aggregate-carrying barges to crane barges that put pile-driving and rock-placing equipment into position. In addition, we have a series of about 10 medium-sized tugs and work-boats.”
“We just finished a dredging project and building a marina at St. Paul and at Dutch Harbor in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, along with doing maintenance dredging for the Port of Anchorage,” Lee said. “All of this equipment is maintained at our own facilities in Rio Vista, right along the Sacramento River, which provides direct access to San Francisco Bay, as well as the countless miles of channels in California’s very fragile Delta.”
“We have two maintenance and repair shops for our marine vessels and about 600 feet of sheet-pile for docking our barges, as well as mooring sites for our dredges at several locations along the river,” Lee said.
Lee continued, “This site is our main corporate repair yard. It is a six-acre facility directly on the water, with ramps for lifting boats into and out of the river. We also have a nine-acre storage yard across the street and a 10-acre facility down the road comprising our steel-fabrication shop. We do all of the capital repairs, all of the retrofits, most of the re-powers on our marine equipment, and build all of the job-specific equipment needed for our operations right here in our own facilities.”
“For our fleet-tending, whether it is for a derrick barge or a crane-barge, and for all of our Bay and Delta shipping, we use our fleet of about 10 medium-sized tugs and work boats that are maintained in Rio Vista. On the other hand, we hire Brusco Tug & Barge for all of our ocean line-towing, which is largely between Rio Vista and Alaska.”
“But we do all of the work on our scows and barges at our own shops in Rio Vista, with one exception, and that is dry-docking,” Lee said. “For that we use Bay Ship & Yacht in Alameda where we currently have one 5,000-cubic-yard dump scow in for maintenance. That shipyard is like a home yard to us. So, I can say that we really have a good relationship with Bay Ship & Yacht, and do a lot of work with them.”
“Not long ago, they had our 1600-horsepower tug Sarah Reed in dry-dock for re-powering. We frequently use that vessel for moving our barges between the Bay and the Delta and for dispersing them to job sites.”
The Fab Shop
Lee and I drove a short distance down the river road to a complex of several beautifully-maintained, sparkling steel buildings with a water tank carrying the Dutra logo. Lee told me that this is Dutra’s fabrication or “fab shop,” which consists of a 30,000 square-foot building with a 40,000-pound overhead crane and a diverse array of metalworking equipment operated by a crew of up to 30 trained craftsmen. Lee added, “We also have a second building, somewhat smaller but with additional equipment and a smaller crane system.”
Not only does the fab shop do a wide variety of work for all of the Dutra companies, it also does metalworking jobs for outside clients. Lee said, “We build crushing equipment for rock quarries throughout California, as well as a wide range of other industrial equipment. The bottom line is that we can build whatever a client wants if they e-mail the drawings to us in an appropriate format.”
Delta and Bay Projects
Dutra continues to be the leading levee-response firm involved in maintaining and repairing Delta levees for a combination of state and federal agencies, as well as private property owners. Recent projects have included emergency repairs for the Upper Jones Tract Breach in 2004 and 2005, followed by the $345-million 2006 Emergency Levee Improvement Project, the Lower Sacramento River Emergency Levee Improvement Project, the Upper Sacramento River Emergency Improvement Project, and the list goes on and on. As you can see, the protection of the Delta’s valuable agricultural lands and its essential role in the state’s water supply continue to remain hot-button issues.
Among recent dredging projects in San Francisco Bay is the Port of Oakland’s multi-million-dollar 50-ft channel-deepening project, where Dutra was a joint-venture partner with Manson Construction. At the same time, Dutra headed a related project in Marin County, the Hamilton Wetlands Restoration Project, which was designed to receive 6-million-cubic yards of Oakland’s dredged materials. Dutra’s fab shop designed and built the 18,000-horsepower pumping system for moving Oakland’s mud from Dutra’s barge off-loading site in mid-bay to the Hamilton site. Dutra has also been providing construction services for a number of berths at the Port of Oakland, as well as maintenance dredging at the Larkspur Landing Ferry Terminal and several of the oil refineries on San Francisco Bay.
From my brief visit to the diverse Dutra facilities along the Sacramento River in Rio Vista, it has become obvious that Dutra is not only playing a leading role in maintaining the levees that protect the Delta, but is also a vibrant element in the economy of the quiet river town of Rio Vista.
As I departed from the river road, I mounted the hill to one of the most unusual museums in California, the Dutra Museum of Dredging, where I will meet our readers next month.
