By Scott Berinato
At the front of the barge two Swedish hydraulic cranes droop out over the river. Eight levers in the pilothouse control the cranes–rotating them, swinging them at the elbow, extending their arms up to 28 feet, spinning the buckets. The buckets look clumsy, but they can snatch up branches that are caught between rocks as well as haul 2,000-pound limbs from beneath the water.
“Probably a good bowler who bowled a 98 that day.” He laughs. “I don’t see any golf clubs, but they are there. They just sink to the bottom.”
The crew members eye the banks, trying to guess when something will become a problem. “That tree looks close–maybe two or three weeks.”
He likes his job, which he says took him a decade to learn well. He says it gives him a sense of accomplishment to clean up a stretch of river. “After all these years the river is like my backyard.”
The rivers and canals around Chicago are cleaner than they used to be–more fish, less pollution, and less trash. “When I started in 1974, in one day we filled four 30-cubic-yard Dumpsters,” says Vanier. “We couldn’t make it further than one mile from the dock because we ran out of room on the barge and the river was too hard to navigate. There’s probably about half the debris out there now compared to 20 years ago.” He pauses. “If we weren’t here you wouldn’t be able to run a small boat through the river. A stump showing above the surface could be a 100-foot tree. That’d punch a hull–easy.”
