By Amanda Rabinowitz
Lake Erie has been frozen for months. With the snow coating the thick ice, it’s difficult to tell where the land ends and water begins. So now is the time the Coast Guard must work around the clock to break up that ice up so the massive freighters can start plying their ore, stone and coal shipments to Great Lakes ports.
Docked at the Cleveland Coast Guard basin near Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame are two tug-boat cutter ships doing all that work. Lt. Marshall Griffin commands the Penobscot Bay – brought in from New Jersey to help Cleveland’s native Neah Bay get the job done. That’s a change from past practice, when an extra cutter is usually only now working its way into the Great Lakes.
“The thought was we would put ourselves in a better position to respond to the needs of industry if we already had a laker in the lakes that could assist,” Griffin said. “We would save the time of the transit and everything at the end of ice season when the locks are closed.”
So, the Penobscot Bay has been in Cleveland since December, mostly escorting freighters that are just passing through, or freeing ships frozen in Lake Erie. Commerce on the Great Lakes diminishes greatly during the winter, but about $2 billion in cargo, including heating oil and coal, still needstravel.
In January, the Penobscot Bay cleared paths for more than a dozen commercial freighters. But Griffin said now is the time of year when breaking up miles of ice is most crucial, most tangible and most repetitive.
“When it’s freezing at night, it’s tough to do flushing operations because any work you do during the day kind of gets reset at night,” Griffin said. “Everything freezes again, so you get back out you kind of have to start over.
Six-hundred tons of fun
The Penobscot Bay gets its name from a body of water on Maine’s coast near Bangor. It looks like a tug boat -- 140 feet long, made of steel and has a wide hull shaped like a football. Traveling at about 4 mph, it can break up to ice as much as30 inches thick. The boat creates a wake more than five feet high that can crack and break ice the length of four football fields on either side of the cutter. A compact train engine powers the ship.
Commanding Officer Bill Woityra said it gets so loud traveling through solid ice that crew members have to wear ear plugs in the engine room. Still, he enjoys it.
“It’s very seldom when the government gives you the keys to a 600-ton ship and tells you to run into things as fast as you can. It’s…the best job I’ve ever had.”
The conditions on Lake Erie this time of year are tough. The lake is frozen solid, but mild temperatures during the day cause massive plates of ice to break up and shift. Some areas long as a half mile. At night when they freeze up, Lt. Griffin says they form massive pressure ridges as high as 15 feet above the surface of the water and frozen to the lake floor.They can stretch for miles.
“This is where this plate over here collided with this plate over here,” Griffin said as he pointed out to the ice plates. “You can see each piece of that is what 6 to 8 inches thick? So it’s 6 to 8 inch ice just crushed together and folded under each other.”
A practice run at a sea of ice
The Penobscot Bay’s mission on this day is to get purposely stuck in a pressure ridge and then do a technique called backing and ramming to get through.
“It’s easy to find ice that will stop the ship. It’s no more complicated than it sounds,” Griffin said. And then it’s a matter of “just back it up, hit it again and keep doin it until you get through it.”
And after several back-and-rams with about seven crew members navigating and making precise calculations, the mission is complete.
“Mind-blowing”
The Penobscot Bay crew has 19 Coast Guard members – most of them from other states assigned to Cleveland for the winter. Shawn Bretts works in the engine room making constant repairs. He’s from Georgia and said seeing Lake Erie frozen is a jaw-dropping sight.
“It’s mind blowing the first time. And you just wake up one morning and it’s just all ice. And actually going through and cutting the ice, and just going through and seeing what this thing can handle. … Just coming up on wind rows that are like 8 to 10 feet high and you just have to blast through them, it takes a beating that’s for sure.”
The Penobscot Bay crew can expect to be extra busy the next several weeks. The Soo Locks that allow ships to travel between Lake Superior and the lower Great Lakes are opening four days earlier than originally scheduledto meet demand by steelmakers. Lt. Marshall Griffin says it shows the Coast Guards work is needed – and may be a sign the economy is recovering.
But before the locks open and freighters start shaking the waters, the crew will take time to enjoy the quiet moments on the frozen lake. Pilot Mark Patton says when they’re not backing and ramming massive pressure ridges, they are enjoying the scenery.
“When you stop and slow down and there’s nobody one else out here, it’s very calm and it’s very peaceful,” he said. “It’s not what you normally see in the summer when we get all those boats. And when you see all that frozen ice it can be pretty amazing.” | 
Two Cents
The Center for Community Solutions