The lock is key
A view from 2016 of the construction expansion project at Charleroi Locks and Dam 4.
Paul Meininger, 67, is the lockmaster at Charleroi Locks and Dam No. 4 and says he is looking to retire soon.
Aaron Stover, a keelman with Murray Energy, holds the rope as a barge passes through Charleroi Locks and Dam 4 on the Monongahela River.
A tugboat goes through the Charleroi Locks and Dam 4.
Alan Nogy, equipment mechanic leader at Charleroi Locks and Dam No. 4.
A pile driver slams through water and into bedrock, its collisions echoing across the river and around houses in Charleroi. It’s making way for concrete columns of Lock Four’s middle wall expansion for more barges and bigger boats. On the opposite side of the former coal mining town, train tracks run parallel to the Monongahela River.
And yet, the faster-moving rail cars can’t keep pace to barge traffic and the commercial boats’ enormous hauls. Thousands of tons of the black carbon fuel are transported on the river every month. Keeping it all in check through the extra noise and construction activity to make sure commercial coal traffic keeps moving is Charleroi native and No. 2 in command, Alan Nogy. The 38-year-old equipment mechanic leader has been working on the river his whole life. Nogy and the Army Corps of Engineers not only have a daily maintenance and navigation schedule to keep, but supervision of the ongoing $1 billion lower Mon lock project as it lurches toward its completion, slated for 2023.
Nogy gets up around 5:30 a.m. every weekday to work with 15 men who have either been in the military or were drawn to civil service because of its culture of commitment and duty. Though literal anchors are seldom deployed in the locks, Nogy’s psychological anchor is a 10-minute reprieve every day in a pitch black office – blinds drawn, emails sometimes the only illumination. Nogy never wanted to stare too long at a screen, despite his aspirations to become an educator. He thought he wanted to be a teacher. He ended up being one anyway.
“I was working with the locks system in high school, through college and here I was graduating with a teaching degree looking for those types of jobs. Why would I give up thousands in pay and five years of service? We’re more like a family than a work crew here, and I wasn’t going to give that up,” says the California University graduate.
Like the military, Nogy was thrown into the civilian equivalent role of a lieutenant. He’s a leader, teacher and mentor who has to lean on the expertise of people decades his senior, sometimes twice the experience, yet ultimately has to delegate and make decisions despite his age difference.
“He just shot up the ranks. I taught him a lot of stuff when he was a stay-in-school worker. Now he’s my boss,” says 66-year-old Jerry Jenko, an ex-Marine who’s retiring from the locks after 40 years of work.
Nogy’s classroom is the spillway and locking system. Under sleet, snow or oppressive heat, he has to constantly improve his understanding of how to deal with potential boat accidents, floods and other high water events. Through the Corps, Nogy can lean on a wide span of disciplines from divers to welders. A perpetual student himself, Nogy has looked to lockmaster Paul Meininger for guidance – and potentially his job. The 67-year-old Meininger says he’s also looking to retire soon.
“We don’t get to interview the people that come here. But the people that stay, it’s attitude, initiative, communication skills – and outstanding intelligence, mechanical skills and an appreciation of menial tasks that are built into something larger – keeping this whole system of nine locks and dams working,” Meininger says.
As the two men teased each other in a lunchroom office, Meininger cuts up tomatoes and cucumbers from his garden and drizzles them in olive oil and salt; the organically-grown meal and both of the men’s tan skin a testament to the summer weather. Their mutual teasing extends to other workers, too. They enjoy the time in which they can do it now with relative ease, because, indeed, winter is coming.
“Lock crews are rugged individuals. Their locking conditions can be downright dreadful. Mud, ice, sideways rain and sweeping and scooping that all away while trying to get boats through in that 10 minutes that could extend to 20, or an hour in that vicious freeze-thaw cycle we get in winter and spring,” Meininger says.
The teasing stops when it’s time to get down to business. The regular routine is swapped out for stressful minute-by-minute decision making to maintain water levels – and sometimes, knowing when to just sit back wait for the water to go where it’s going to go. Such was the case in March 2015, when high water rose tens of feet above the spillway’s helipad and all Nogy could do was watch from the windows. But until those events, Nogy is ripping into his crew like a fraternity brother to his incoming freshmen class.
“I pick on everyone. If I’m not picking on you, then you have to worry, because when I’m doing it, it means I care,” Nogy says.
“The sense of wit and humor, that’s the outlet for dealing with the repetitious,” Meininger says, “and for me, I use sarcasm to make a point and let them know I care about them and I can count on them.” If the crew were stoic and humorless – the caricatured stereotype of military – then rapport and trust would rot like river-soaked rope.
The family bond is what makes the lock system so reliable even as it undergoes construction – improvements to make the water elevators for the river staircase a navigable system for river traffic year round. Nogy never had to leave home to find his calling, leading to further teasing from public affairs officer John Kelly that he is indeed Mr. Lock Four.
“Look, that’s what this place was called before it was Charleroi,” Nogy says, “When people asked you where you were from, I said, ‘I’m from lock four.'”
Mr. Lock Four should enjoy the playful taunts about himself and his crew while it lasts. Then again, they’re all going to need a laugh while dredging nine miles of river down to the lock at Elizabeth.