Carolina the dredge will be used in the expansion and deepening of the Houston Ship Channel

Port Houston commissioners on Friday awarded two contracts totaling $429 million to two dredging companies as part of the $1 billion expansion of the Houston Ship Channel that officially kicked off last month.

This is believed to be the largest dredging contract awarded in the port’s history, said Ric Campo, chairman of the port commission, at the meeting.

“From my perspective this is a win-win-win-win-win,” said Dean Corgey, vice president of the Seafarers International Union’s Gulf Coast Region and a commissioner who represents the city of Houston.

“Project Eleven”— so called because it’s the eleventh major construction project involving the ship channel in its hundred-year plus history—involves a lot of dredging, which is to be expected as the Port of Houston isn’t a natural deep-water port.

The 52-mile-long ship channel, which winds from Galveston Bay to the Turning Basin just east of downtown Houston, requires continuous dredging even when the channel isn’t being expanded.

The companies awarded the contracts, Weeks Marine and Curtin Maritime Corp, will tackle upstream segments. Port officials explained that port staff evaluated bids based on value, environmental impacts and opportunities for small, minority- and woman-owned businesses.

Another segment of the channel, along the Galveston Bay reach, is being dredged by Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corp., under a $92 million contract awarded in November.

FIGHTING BACKLOG: Port Houston works overtime to get consumer goods on the road

“The bottom line is that Project 11 makes the Houston Ship Channel safer and more efficient for everybody to use,” Campo said. “All the problems get solved when you deepen and widen the channel.”

Project Eleven was planned before the pandemic and has nothing to do with the supply chain disruptions that have, among other things, led to congestion at most of the nation’s ports and presented President Joe Biden with a daunting political challenge.

Port authorities are taking measures in response to those disruptions, even as work on Project Eleven gets underway. Port Houston has already expanded its truck gate operating hours, to include an extra hour on weekdays and, as of this month, a permanent Saturday shift.

Also, the U.S. Department of Agriculture on Thursday announced a new partnership with the Port of Houston, under which the federal government will kick in some funds to help obtain more than a thousand additional wheeled chassis, which are used to move refrigerated shipping containers, also called “reefers.”

The chassis have been hard to come by of late, because of supply chain disruptions. In the absence of enough chassis, the Port’s ability to handle chilled or frozen agricultural products - think meat and poultry - has been constrained.

Erica Grieder is a business reporter for the Houston Chronicle.

She joined the Houston Chronicle, as a metro columnist, in 2017. Prior to that she spent ten years based in Austin, reporting on politics and economics, as the southwest correspondent for The Economist, from 2007-2012, then as a senior editor at Texas Monthly, from 2012-2016. In 2013, she published her first book, "Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right: What America Can Learn from the Strange Genius of Texas." An Air Force brat, Erica thinks of San Antonio as home. She is a member of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas's Emerging Leaders Council, and holds degrees from the University of Texas at Austin's LBJ School of Public Affairs and Columbia University, where she majored in philosophy.

How did investigators find Holly Marie Clouse, the child of a murdered Texas couple? It all came down to a question about spelling — and a birth certificate.