Most residents never see where their trash goes after the truck pulls away. In this city, a fair share of it goes to the water first. Household waste collected on the east side of the city is compacted at a marine transfer station, loaded into covered barges, and towed down the river to a rail yard, where it’s transferred again onto trains bound for a landfill three states away. The barges cut an estimated sixty truck trips a day off local streets. Captain Odile Fontaine has piloted them for eleven years, most of that time as the only woman working the tugs on this stretch of river. We spoke with her on the deck of her tug, the Marisol, during a loading changeover.
How does trash end up on a boat in the first place?
People assume it’s a truck the whole way, truck to transfer station, truck to landfill. For us it’s truck to station, station compacts it into a barge, barge goes down the river to a rail yard, then it’s train the rest of the way. The barge segment replaces what would otherwise be hundreds of long-haul truck trips a week through neighborhoods that already have enough truck traffic. That was the whole argument for building the marine transfer stations in the first place, back in the nineties: get the waste off the local streets and onto the water, where one tow does the work of dozens of trucks.
What does a normal shift look like?
I come on at the transfer station around six, and my crew and I do a walk-around on the barge before anything gets loaded, checking the hull, the bilge, making sure the covers seal properly, because an uncovered barge in this business is a barge that smells for three miles and draws every gull on the river. Loading takes a couple of hours depending on volume. Then it’s about a six-hour tow down to the rail yard, we time it with the tide because pushing against an outgoing tide on a loaded barge burns fuel we don’t need to burn. Drop it, pick up the empty barge from the previous run, tow back. A full round trip is close to fourteen hours.
What’s the hardest part of the job that people wouldn’t guess?
Weather, but not the way people think. It’s not big storms, we don’t run in those. It’s fog. Fog on this river with a loaded barge and commercial shipping traffic coming the other way is the thing that actually scares me, more than wind, more than a hard tide. We have radar, we have AIS, but a tug pushing a loaded barge doesn’t turn or stop quickly, so you’re reading the water and the screen at the same time and trusting both.
Is there a moment the job earned your respect for it, rather than the other way around?
My second year, we lost an engine mid-tow, at night, with a full load and a falling tide. My captain at the time, an older guy named Duchesne, didn’t panic, he just started working the problem, called it in, got a second tug out to us, and we sat there for three hours holding position with one engine until help arrived. Nothing dramatic happened. That’s the point. The whole system is built so that when something does go wrong, dramatic isn’t what happens next, because everyone knows their job and does it.
Do you think about where the trash ends up, after it leaves your barge?
Sometimes. Not as much as people expect. My job is the six hours it’s on my boat and making sure that trip is safe and clean, no spills, no smell, nothing in the water it shouldn’t be in. What happens at the landfill three states away isn’t in my hands. I do think about the truck trips we’re not making, though. I grew up two blocks from where one of these transfer stations sits now, and I remember what that street sounded like before it was there. That part I think about.