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There's Cocoa in the River, but Not Any Marshmallows
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
Three of 10 freight containers that slid off a barge at Pier 7 in Brooklyn remained in partial view yesterday.
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By ANDY NEWMAN
Published: January 10, 2006
This much is fairly certain. The freight containers full of cocoa beans were sealed, so the stretch of the East River off Pier 7 in Brooklyn was almost definitely not turning into a delicious caramel-brown inlet of cold chocolate. Sorry, Willy Wonka fans.
But there is a problem on the waterfront. Sometime Saturday night or Sunday morning, a barge laden with freight containers began to list badly while docked at the pier. One by one, the 10 freight containers slid off. At least two of them were filled with raw cocoa beans - about 800,000 pounds, altogether. After they sank, the barge followed them to the bottom. No one was hurt.
Not much has happened since then. Three freight containers, probably empty, remain above the surface. Two of them are now tied to the pier. The third bobs in the drink 50 yards from the shore, one end pointed in the air. It can be seen from Columbia Street, which runs between the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the long blue warehouses that line the piers half a mile south of the Brooklyn Bridge. Flocks of pigeons frequently swoop by on what look like reconnaissance missions.
Today or tomorrow, a salvage company is expected to begin righting the sunken vessels.
Most everything else remains a mystery. The Coast Guard, which is investigating the sinking, would not comment on its status last night. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the pier and the security on it, referred all questions to the Coast Guard.
So this is what is known. The beans, about $600,000 worth, were bound for a factory in Chicago run by Blommer Chocolate, one of the country's biggest suppliers of chocolate. They were being stored at the Brooklyn Marine Terminal, a major trans-shipment point for cocoa, and had probably come from Ivory Coast.
The New York Cross Harbor Railroad sent a 50-year-old barge, loaded with empty freight containers, from its terminal a few miles south on the Brooklyn waterfront, up to Pier 7. The full barge was to be tugged across the harbor to Jersey City and the containers were to be put on a train to Chicago. American Warehousing, which rents space at the marine terminal, filled some of the containers with unbagged cocoa beans on Friday and Saturday.
On Sunday morning around 9:30, a Port Authority worker noticed that the 360-foot barge was sinking.
An employee of one of the companies involved, who insisted on anonymity because the investigation was continuing, said yesterday that whatever caused the mishap, it was "absolutely not" because of incorrect loading. If that had been the case, he said, the barge would have righted itself after the cargo rolled off. It did not, which, he said, indicated a leak in the air compartment below the deck of the barge that normally keeps it afloat.
Jim Cornell, managing director of the New York Cross Harbor Railroad, which owns the barge, said that so far as he knew, the barge - the first one to sink in the company's 50-year history - had been in good repair. He said he was curious to know what had happened.
"We don't have the authoritative report on what transpired," he said.
Even if the worst should occur and the containers should burst as they are being brought up from the bottom, a yummy-sweet environmental disaster is still considered unlikely.
For one thing, unprocessed cocoa beans are not sweet. They are bitter and chalky and do not taste particularly like chocolate.
As for the environmental disaster part, Robert Reid, a benthic ecologist for the federal government's Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Sandy Hook, N.J., said that cocoa posed little threat to the estuarine worms and snails that sift through the silt of the harbor bottom.
"It's not in their natural diet," he said, "but if there is a nutrition source there, the bottom-feeding worms and snails might be interested in it."
Mr. Reid was reminded that cocoa contains caffeine. Could there be an outbreak of jittery snails whizzing through the silt?
"Might it make them a little more hyper?" he said. "No. I don't think it would be a harmful thing."
