Dredging

I flew to Miami early this morning on business. Behind the hotel at which I’m staying downtown, two tugboats, one at each end of a giant barge, nudged the vessel into into place—they’re dredging the river to improve its use as a shipping channel. I thought this would involve a complex underwater procedure—robots, maybe. But no: there is an excavator sitting on the barge, its boom angling into the water to scoop up sediment. Not as exciting as I’d have thought.