How much does it cost to dredge soil?

Answer 1

Dredging is the removal of stuff from the bottom of a bay, lake, river or other body of water. The costs of dredging vary as widely as the job. If you need to make a drainage canal deeper (or restore its depth), you can use a big bucket and do it from the bank. Costs are modest at a few hundred dollars per hour. Compare that to all out dredging like deepening a shipping channel or a harbor. Fasten your seatbelt. The big dredge can either bucket or "vacuum" the bottom materials away, and they can be directed into a hold onboard, onto a barge or "piped" out of the way. The costs of this kind of activity rocket into the thousands of dollars per hour, and can go higher, depending on the job and what is required to do it. Removal of sediments and muck is one thing. Removing rocks and such costs a ton more. Deepening New York harbor using a big bucket dredge and scows to hold the spill and tugs to pull it away costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per day. Use the YouTube link to the Dredging New York Harbor" to see the operation. At the end of the clip, the engineer dude says it costs $100,000 to $120,000 per day to do the job. That's too low for all the equipment and all that time (24 hours). It's gotta be more, and not just 'cause fuel costs have gone up. Wikipedia has information on dredging and on the equipment. You'll find the links below. Just for fun, we've provided a link to the Geopotes 14, one of the world's largest trailing suction hopper dredges. This bad boy sucks up material from the bottom and then dumps it in on on-board hold. It will then run out to sea a ways and dump the material before coming back to suck up more. You can't get this vessel for anything less than tens of thousands of dollars per hour, and there's probably a 48 hour minimum or something like that. What the heck. We went all out and included a link to a YouTube post of the big beast in action. YouTube has quite a few posts on dredging. Put "Dredge" in as a search argument and see how many hits you get.