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The lock wound up reopening four months to the day, and Perkins said it’s been a huge success for all of the business and industry that use the lock. The traffic that would normally come through Demopolis was rerouted to the Mississippi River, which added time and cost to the shipping.

“This time of year, the Mississippi River had a high water level, so it’s not as easy for our users,” Perkins said. “That was over 1,600 miles extra for them. The economical losses they had not directly coming to it was into the millions per month. We believe it might have been upwards of $20 million in losses for them.”

Lee Turnipseed, lock supervisor, said he has had a lot of long days and weeks since the failure occurred. The lock can service any vessel from a kayak to a large barge. The whole process can take upward of an hour to complete from when they first radio that they want to use the lock to navigating their boat into to the lock until they are go out the other side. Once the boat gets into the lock, it takes about 12 minutes to raise or lower to the level depending on whether the vessel is traveling upstream or downstream.

While they still do not caused the concrete miter barrier to fail, they poured 2,500 cubic feet of new concrete that will also help prevent damage to the barrier to prevent this from happening and extend the life of the lock.

“We poured the concrete all the way across the lock so that it would protect the remaining steel that was there and also the breach steering,” Perkins said. We felt like we got a great quality job that should last us a very long time.”