Wall Street Journal 
27 May 1997 Pages A1 and A9
by Michael J. McCarthy

Plying the Mississippi Has Been
A Risky Sort of Job Training

Easing around a tight bend of the Ohio River, Chris Brinkop sees the Cincinnati skyline rising through the wheelhouse windows. With his fingertips on the steering levers, he guides the fully loaded barge to midriver and plows past a menacing abutment of the Brent Spence Bridge.

Another obstacle cleared. Eyeing the twin towers of the Procter & Gamble building off the bank, Mr. Brinkop is aiming for easy water.

Suddenly, the spell breaks. "I've come to a dead stop," says a befuddled Mr. Brinkop, a river pilot who cut his teeth two decades ago on the mighty Mississippi.

Paducah's Mississippi

Mr. Brinkop, now halted by computer technicians, isn't really in Cincinnati, nor is he on a boat. He is standing before a lit-up panel of nautical gauges in a dark theater in Paducah, Ky., for a test run of the nation's first riverboat simulator.

In a meeting of Mark Twain and Bill Gates, salty old river pilots are suddenly being dragged into what looks like the 21st century. Next Monday, Midwestern mariners from this century-old profession begin training on the first machine designed to simulate the villainous physics of inland waterways.

Airline pilots have to log simulator time before taking the controls of planes. Modern sea-tanker captains train with crude "blue water" simulators. But for "brown water" towboat pilots, it has always been sink-or-swim on real rivers, where they must learn to deal with narrow and increasingly congested channels. At best, the waters they ply are obstacle courses of points, bars and islands. Toss in periodic flooding and unpredictable currents, and mistakes can be costly when your "classroom" is a quarter mile long and loaded with tons of cargo.

"My first 18 days out, we hit locks, bridges, busted up twice, killed a guy on a speedboat," says Jeff Operle, a 33-year-old river skipper, gnawing into a plug of Kodiak chewing tobacco as he recalls his maiden voyage as a deck hand in the early 1980s. "Surely to God, I remember thinking, this is a dangerous job."

With river shipping growing in the early 1990s, more green pilots have taken the wheel, and waterborne-transport accidents jumped 44%, to more than 3,000 a year. Remember the barge carrying 64,000 tons of corn that ran into a New Orleans shopping mall last December? In a fatal accident in 1993, a barge struck a bridge in fog, derailing an Amtrak train near Mobile, Ala. Outraged at chemical spills and other mishaps, communities have begun telling barges when they can work their waters and at what speed.

Joint Venture

Enter boat school. For $340 a day per student, riverboat companies will put their veteran pilots through radar training, emergency drills and other maneuvers at the four new simulators at Paducah's Center for Maritime Education.

The high-tech, $4.3 million simulator project is the darling of the largest barge operators in the country and New York's Seamen's Church Institute, an Episcopal charity founded in 1834 as a champion of seafarers in distress. Companies that transport grain, petroleum and chemicals by river have committed themselves to send hundreds of their pilots to the school run by Seamen's Church.

In the beginning, the institute floated chapels out into New York Harbor, providing places where sailors could worship, and also where they could tell of crew abuse and report waterfront boarding-houses that bilked men on shore leave of their wages. But over the years, the institute's mission shifted more to training. During the two world wars, it drilled 15,000 deck and engine officers.

"We consider ourselves guardians of forgotten mariners," says Andrea Laine, a Seamen's Church spokeswoman. "But we ourselves were ignoring inland mariners."

There are about 21,000 seafarers working on U.S. towboats and barges. Pilots, who earn $40,000 to $70,000 a year, generally have been promoted through the ranks, from deck hand, to mate, then engineer, steersman, pilot and, eventually, captain. Crews typically work a month straight, six hours on, six off, seven days a week. They get alternate months off. "It's a unique lifestyle," says Craig E. Philip, president of Ingram Barge Co. of Nashville, Tenn.

One of the largest U.S. operators, Ingram will need replacements soon, as about 25% of its 180 pilots, in their 60s, contemplate retirement. Lately, Mr. Philip has been dropping off recruitment brochures at truck stops. "We draw from the same crowd," he says.

Until recently, technology wasn't sophisticated enough to simulate swift, random river currents, shifting sandbars and passing pleasure boats. More than 17,000 miles of navigable river splinter the U.S., and each mile stretch of water is as unique as a snowflake.

Taking Pains

So Seamen's Church has spent more than a year videotaping the heavily trafficked trouble spots and exhaustively replicating towers, buildings and bridges -- landmarks pilots use to plan turns and plot vectors.

"A deep-sea captain would be terrified on a river," says Capt. William Douglas, director of the simulator project, who logged more than two decades aboard ocean freighters before joining the institute as an instructor. "You're constantly in close quarters where feet, not miles, count."

Mile 234, on the "lower Miss," seems jinxed. Last March, high water stirred up mysterious eddies, complicating navigation on the river just past Devils Swamp, above Baton Rouge, La. From the instant a pilot slams the twin locomotive engines into reverse in an emergency, a barge usually can't come to a stop for half a mile, sometimes more.

"We've had a lot of near misses and accidents on Mile 234," says Norb Whitlock, a senior vice president at American Commercial Barge Line Co., a division of CSX Corp., whose pilots are in the inaugural class for simulator exercises.

Some pilots just can't wait to go to Paducah. "I'd like to try some stretches of river on the simulator to see where I'd screw up," says Mr. Operle, the river pilot on a towboat called the Sarah L. Ingram.

On a Real River

Motoring down the actual Ohio River, along the serpentine border between Illinois and Kentucky, Mr. Operle is shoving a flotilla of 15 barges, lashed together three abreast. Each of the massive tubs sits deep in the river carrying 1,750 tons of black coal, in heaping mounds. The boat and the barges it is pushing are longer than three football fields.

Mr. Operle gingerly noses the tow -- 105 feet wide -- into Kentucky's Smithland Lock. The lock, just 110 feet across, could make any pilot claustrophobic, since it allows a clearance of only 30 inches on either side of the barges. Innumerable scrapes and scars on the entry wall suggest a demolition derby of previous parking attempts. At this very spot about seven years ago, one of these $6 million towboats rolled over in the current. In two minutes, the river swallowed it whole.

One misstep away from a watery grave, veteran river pilots are intrigued but skeptical about the newfangled simulators. "Boat handling is tough," says Robert Bader, a longtime captain, at the towering bridge of the Sara L. Ingram. "Bottom line, you've got to learn it out here."

Copyright © 1997 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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