Pittsburgh-A 295-foot barge moored along the Ohio River near here with an estimated 2,700 tons of anhydrous ammonia got tangled up and emerged without incident when two empty barges broke loose from a tug earlier this month. “The two barges broke away and ours got bumped into. Other than that there wasn’t much to it,” is all that Steve Butts, vice president, sales, with Kirby Inland Marine, would say about the incident that occurred in the mid-afternoon March 16. But Commander Richard Timme, who heads the Coast Guard marine safety unit based in Pittsburgh, did confirm that there was superficial damage to a tool shed on the Kirby barge. He said another barge, belonging to Consol Energy, took 24 hours to refloat after being shoved down the river, stopping just short of a main bridge support and running aground on a sandbar. “(But) there was no pollution and no injuries, and release of the anhydrous ammonia was never a concern,” Timme summed up.
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