Paul Speese
Saturday around noon I was riding to Port Canaveral on my bike and noticed emergency vehicles and fire engines parked just by the beach blocking the the pedestrian on ramps. There was clearly some type of emergency underway. I pedalled a few more blocks and found a street that was not blocked by emergency vehicles and walked my bike down to the beach. What I saw was amazing. A huge barge, 200- 300 feet in length had broken loose from its anchor or whatever they use to to moor it when not in use. You can generally see it several miles out to see for the last 6 months or so where there is some kind of dredging process for cruise ships and other large ships coming in and out of Port Canaveral. The Coast Guard or Civil Authorities must have ordered a Tug Boat to try and rescue the barge and at what seemed like the last few minutes before it was going to crash on the beach the Tug Boat appeared to secure a cable and pull the boat away from the impending beaching. There were thousands of people on this stretch of the beach at the South end of Port Canaveral and North end of Cocoa Beach, it would have been quite a scene to evacuate all of those people once the decision was made that they could not stop it from coming ashore. Anyway, congrats to the tug boat operator and whomever else facilitated the capture and turnaround. Check out the picture below.
P.S. The reason I said again is that this barge washed completely ashore back in February or March of this year. How does this happen?
