Tulsa District U.S. Army Corps of Engineers workers are replacing hydraulic pipes used to control opening and closing of the lock gates on Newt Graham Lock and Dam. The scheduled work should be completed and locks should be operational by Sunday, May 18.
The scheduled maintenance periods are used to replace 45-year old equipment, which includes replacing corroding carbon steel pipes. The new, stainless steel pipes should last twice as long as the carbon steel pipes. Approximately 2000 feet of tubing is being replaced.
This outage is one of a series of scheduled maintenance periods used to upgrade and repair aging equipment on the waterway in order to minimize costly unscheduled outages. Each day of an unscheduled shutdown costs the industry more than a million dollars a day.
The traffic through Newt Graham Lock and Dam averages more than 300,000 tons a month.