Elissa at her home berth at the Texas Seaport Museum. D uring Hurricane Ike, the water level rose eleven feet over what is seen here. (1) The two surviving wooden cluster pile dolphins from the original berth can be seen at the inner end of the slip. (2) On the Jar right at the base of the museum wall, adjacent to an old anchor, is the ring through which the heavy mooring chain emerges from a large concrete deadman. This system cannot be left in place all the time because the chain will trip visitors, but it is a straightforward operation to get the cable offthe bower anchor and run ashore to shackle onto the deadman under the museum. (3) To the left are the two steel monopiles that are the key components of the system. Designed to accommodate a storm surge of up to 25 feet, the piles rise about 30 feet over mean water but are 120 feet long to gain sufficient purchase in the sand. The nylon mooring lines are set in large bights so that they can ride up the piling without binding. The 3-inch white "pin" can be seen sticking out just under the cap. The fendering system on the offihore corner is a stack of tires from earthmoving machines. The key to the system is long leads at low angles for plenty ofshock absorption and the ability to rise with the water level. Another hurricane season is upon us, and stewards ofhistoric vessels need to be prepared to safeguard their ships, not just aloft, but alow. which wo uld be able to withstand a storm surge. Eventually the light clicked on: the solution was unattainable for this paltry sum. If the roo t of the problem was that the berth had been dreadfully under-designed and cheaply constructed in the firs t place, how could we succeed designing to cost, which had been far too low to begin with? I trust this confess ion of dimwirted ness is embarrassingly and glaringly obvious to any engineer reading this. In our defense I can only say rhar fo r years the resto ration had p roceeded on such a shoestring budget, relative to the scope of wo rk, that we h ad acquired a mindset of maki ng do with what resources we had . H owever belatedly, it did sink in eventually that we had to first ask the question "what is the best engineering answer to this problem ?" and then figure out what it would cost and how to pay for it. Fortunately for us, Galveston had recen tly hi red a new port engineer, Traian Moga (originally fro m Romania) . H e studied hur-
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ricane models and came up with a worst-case scenario where a surge of water as high as 25-30 feet over normal high water was entirely possible. Elissa's berth lay on an approximately north/so uth axis along rhe Galveston waterfront, with the island to the south and ship channel to the north . To the east was Pier 21 , which had some open space and an old shed, which housed the maintenance shop (the Texas Seaport Museum building was nor built until 1988) , and the banana boat wharf east of the shop. The west side of the berth was open to a basin near 150 yards across, within which were finger piers for the frequent comings and goings of commercial fish ing vessels. There are basically two ways to design a mooring system to deal wi th an extremely high rise of water. The first is to build a structure adjacent to the ship, strong enough and high enough for the job, and rely on some system of attachment to slid ing tracks
SEA HISTORY 132, AUTUMN 2010