Life is sweet for Donjon Marine.

(From Lloyds List)

Byline: Success in the muck business requires grit as well as depth – not to mention wits. Or Wittes, to be precise. Rajesh Joshi profiles Donjon Marine, the family-owned group that has become the biggest dredging contractor in the New York area, and much m

NEW York knows a thing or two about being out of one's depth. Quietly, away from the public's eye yet right under its nose, a $2.25bn dredging project is under way, round the clock and seven days a week, to make the approaches in New York harbour passable for the bigger and bigger containerships that seem to be our collective destiny.

A major landmark is expected to be reached next month, when relentless dredging clears a depth of 45 feet in the Kill Van Kull, the four-mile long channel that leads ships from Upper New York Bay to Port Newark on the New Jersey mainland, the trade and cargo hotspot connected by road and rail to the rest of the US.

Considering that Kill Van Kull was naturally only 30 feet deep, the dredging is a remarkable success. But this success is purely academic, and on paper only. Because the goal of 45 ft set two decades ago now needs to be revised to a minimum of 50 ft, as would befit the massive new containerships that the Port of New York and New Jersey hopes to attract.

This wish got off to rather a rocky start five years ago, when the 6,000 teu Regina Maersk, which has a draught of 47 ft, was forced to arrive in port only one-fifths loaded on what was supposed to be a set-piece media event hailing the arrival of one of the world's biggest boxships in New York harbour.

The message is clear: Maersk and its feckless ilk may defect to rivals, such as Baltimore or Nova Scotia, if something is not done about all that stuff on the seabed. So the dredging in Kill Van Kull, as well as at other locations around New York harbour, is expected to continue for at least another decade often going back to the drawing board, since the extra 10 feet that now needs to be moved consists of solid rock in many cases.