Innovation and ingenuity drive Cashman Dredging’s success

Thanks to its reputation for delivering state-of-the-art solutions to some of the most complex and challenging projects, Cashman Dredging has become one of the top marine construction and dredging firms in the U.S.

Having more than 50 years of experience, this Quincy, Mass.-based company has executed some of the most difficult and complex projects all over the world—from offshore drilling, to the largest remediation dredging project in U.S. history—many of which have earned national recognition for their complexity and engineering significance.

According to Jay M. Cashman, Founder & Chairman of the Board, “The Cashman culture thrives on innovation, which we believe is the key to our continued success in creating the next generation of modern infrastructure, revitalizing our ports and waterways, restoring, and preserving our environment, and providing alternative sources of clean energy.”

Over the years, the company has added a lot of innovative equipment to the dredging industry, such as the new drag ripper and the sloped clamshell bucket, which we will explain in detail below.

The new drag ripper, developed entirely in-house, is an innovative piece of equipment for capital improvements dredging projects that agitate and loosen glacial till, desiccated clay, weathered rock, and other stiff material for later removal by a clamshell dredge.

The innovation reduces the need for an excavator, cuts down on equipment wear and tear, and saves time and money.

It essentially takes a standard drag beam and marries it with a ripper shank from a bulldozer. It is then hung from a deck barge and advanced through the target material on the seafloor.

The ripper shank sticks below the ripper carriage in a similar fashion to how the ripper shank sits below the bottom track elevation of a bulldozer.

The drag ripper’s debut was on Cashman’s Boston Harbor Phase II Deepening Project for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the Spring of 2019, and it proved successful in preparing the project’s hard material for quicker, more cost-effective removal by clamshell dredge and led to the project being completed nearly a year ahead of schedule.

The company patented the drag ripper in February of this year but has made it available for all U.S. dredging contractors to adopt.

Similarly, Cashman together with their partners Anvil Attachments designed a state-of-the-art sloped clamshell bucket that was introduced first in 2017 on the contoured subsurface profile of the New Bedford Harbor Cleanup Project in Massachusetts.

Conventional flat-level clamshell buckets have been found to result in an undesirable and wasteful degree of bucket overlap when dredging a sloped surface and are not functionally ideal for complying with tight accuracy tolerances called for on environmental dredging projects with slopes.

This new 3:1 stair-step sloped bucket achieved required design depth with accuracy, decreased bucket overlap from 70% to 10%, efficiently collected more material than water with fewer bucket takes needed, and reduced in-water sediment suspension, all while never sacrificing production.

The introduction of this bucket positively improved the project schedule and overall cost, making it a success. Cashman patented the sloped clamshell bucket in 2020 and made it available for all U.S. dredging contractors to adopt.

Being driven by the passion and ability to solve impossible challenges, there is no doubt that industry experts within the Cashman will deliver more innovations in the years to come.