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Draining the water from a 600-foot lock on the Mississippi River and keeping the lock dry for two winter months is — to say the least — a challenging task. EquipmentShare partnered with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to pull it off recently at Lock and Dam 25 north of St. Louis near Winfield, Missouri.
Advanced Solutions™ at EquipmentShareTM proved it has the pump-and-power equipment, engineering knowledge and customer service to handle the biggest dewatering jobs.
“It was a great cooperative effort in terms of the Army Corps supplying a huge amount of labor and us providing the equipment and having specialists on the scene,” said John Misuraca, the territory account manager who initially got EquipmentShare involved in the job. “To our team’s credit, they handled all the challenges every step of the way and did what it took to make sure this project kicked off successfully. It was a great project, and hopefully it turns into more down the line.”
Project background
The upper Mississippi River and its tributaries are vital arteries for American shipping, with 60% of the nation’s corn and soybeans transported on those waters, according to the Corps of Engineers.
To keep all those barges moving, the Corps of Engineers built 37 lock-and-dam structures that ensure at least a 9-foot channel, which is needed to accommodate large towboats. The locks serve as stairsteps, allowing boats to move to lower elevations below the dams and higher elevations above the dams.
But boats have grown larger since most of those locks were built in the 1930s, and now delays are common at the busiest locations. To improve the situation, the Corps of Engineers has begun a massive project to build seven new 1,200-foot locks adjacent to the current 600-foot locks. To do that work, the locks — and the ground beneath them — need to be dry.
That’s where EquipmentShare enters the story.
Misuraca has a long history of working with contractors on dewatering jobs on the Mississippi River and its channels. Misuraca discovered information about the Lock and Dam 25 project on the Corps of Engineers website and did some investigating to learn the details about the initial phase of the job. It entailed draining the water from the lock so the Corps of Engineers could do inspections and some prep work for the 1,200-foot lock expansion project, which is slated to begin in 2027.
Misuraca passed that information on to Curt Hogancamp, EquipmentShare’s leading expert on pumps, who worked with EquipmentShare senior leaders and the legal department to come up with the winning bid.
Engineering a solution
EquipmentShare needed to provide a long list of specialized equipment.
- Pumps and accessories
- 24 50-horsepower 8-inch deep-well submersible pumps.
- Four 98-horsepower 10-inch electric submersible pumps.
- 5,000 feet of fused high-density polyethylene (HDPE) pipe.
- Power
- 6,000 feet of electric cable.
- 26 variable frequency drives (VFDs).
- 20 electromagnetic flow meters.
- Six 330-kW generators.
- Auxiliary fuel cells.
- Load banks.
- I-line panels.
To allow the Corps of Engineers to construct the lock chamber floor and install improvements inside the lock chamber, the surface and ground water had to be removed. The lock has 24 deep wells in the concrete basin. Submersible pumps connected to 100-foot cables needed to go into those wells. The pumps would move water up through the HDPE pipe, out of the lock and into the river channel.
“The Army Corps, looking at it from an engineering standpoint and procurement, they had a rough idea of the scope and the equipment they would require,” said Hogancamp, who has nearly three decades of experience with major dewatering projects. “Then it required laying it out on paper and figuring out how to make it work and distribute the power.”
In December 2024, it was time to put Hogancamp’s design into practice. The 77-day, $1.3 million job, which wrapped up on March 3, went smoothly, thanks to a team effort.
- Misuraca was the point person communicating with the Army Corps of Engineers.
- District Sales Manager Justin Wann regularly supervised on-site.
- Brandon Cutshaw, the general manager of the Indianapolis Advanced Solutions branch — which provided the equipment — offered day-to-day leadership.
- Service Tech Steven Payne assisted with the set-up and programming of the VFDs.
- District Project Manager James Reed fused pipes in frigid weather.
“It went well,” Hogancamp said. “It shows the Army Corps and other contractors that have been exposed to it that we have the know-how and capability to do a big dewatering job like this.”
