Clifford’s conversion was likely motivated by the prospect of plentiful dredge work following the Mississippi floods and the ensuing Flood Control Act of 1928. The drastically altered Lake Fithian, unrecognizable from its former self, was launched a second time in 1927. In 1926 the vessel was sold to William Clifford, who had just patented a technique for converting common cargo vessels into hydraulic or cutter-suction dredges. It was later acquired by the New Orleans and South American Steamship Company to run the first direct steamer line between the Crescent City and the west coast of South America, sailing via the Panama Canal to Ecuador, Peru and Chile. The craft was built in 1919 by the Globe Shipbuilding Company of Superior, Wisconsin for the United States Shipping Board, one of scores of “Lakers” built to haul arms to the allies during World War I. The Lake Fithian did not begin life as a dredge. It was almost certainly also used by Robert Moses to build up the oceanfront at Jones Beach State Park. The “mud-chewing monster,” as the Brooklyn Eagle called it, was owned by the National Dredging Company, which previously employed the huge craft to cut flood-control channels on the Mississippi River after the Great Flood of 1927. It pumped some six million cubic yards of sand slurry from Rockaway Inlet to fill the Gerritsen salt marshes for an extravagant, ultimately aborted plan for Marine Park-what would have been the largest, costliest urban playground in America. The 2,700-ton Lake Fithian was the most powerful hydraulic dredge in the world in the 1930s.
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