as a portland native, i do not approve of dredging up awful memories.

That can cost millions of dollars in terms of lost productivity. If the river isn’t deep enough, ships cannot be filled to capacity. The process is slow and deliberate, yet the island grows unbelievably fast. A bulldozer channels it into a tiny river of its own, fanning it out and slowing the flow just enough for the water to release the grit before spilling back into the Columbia River. The pipes hiss as gray slurry runs through the pipes and gushes out near the middle of the island. It sucks up to 35,000 cubic yards of material off the channel bed each day, sending a slurry of water and dredge material through a network of pipes around 2.5 miles long to an upland deposit site. The dredge mows down sand shoals that grow in the bottom of the channel. It is moved by tugboats to a shallow area, where it can use two pilings to “walk” itself around as it works. The Oregon, owned by the Port of Portland, functions like the head and motor of a giant cannister vacuum. Not far from his office, a knee-high steel pipe runs to the center of the island from the dredge Oregon, floating off the distance. “We’re thinking of putting a set of stairs up it and a rail around it so I can sit up there in my lounge chair.” “They want to know when I’m going to get a palm tree,” he joked. “The thing is, we’re running out of space to put that material,” said Jeffrey Henon, the Corps’ public affairs specialist.

About 1 billion cubic yards have been excavated since the Corps began maintaining the shipping channel more than 90 years ago.

To keep the ports of Portland and Vancouver accessible to oceangoing ships, every year the Corps dredges 6 million to 8 million cubic yards of sand from the 107-mile shipping channel between Astoria and Vancouver - enough to fill the Seattle Seahawks’ CenturyLink Field twice.

That’s only a fraction of what’s pulled each year from the Columbia River shipping channel. Army Corps of Engineers added 152,000 cubic yards of sand to the island in about two weeks. In 2015, the last time Rice was used as a deposit site, the U.S. 10 while standing on the island’s plateau several stories above the waterline. “A month ago we would have been standing in water,” Neil DeRosier said on Aug. Except for a few spots, Rice Island has no trees, no shrubs, no grass, not a single stone - just 250 acres of gray sand.

As a portland native, i do not approve of dredging up awful memories.