Derek Lacey
The first thing you might notice about the recent report by ENR Southeast region editor Derek Lacey on the $1-billion U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ lock replacement project at Chickamauga Dam near Chattanooga, Tenn., are two descriptive wide angle photographs of the project to complement his narrative. One shows a barge entering the existing dock. Another shows the new dock chamber and the Tennessee River.
Lacey could have shot project photos with nothing more complex than his phone camera. But as a veteran newspaper reporter and editor, he tugs along a Nikon or Canon digital camera, putting them to good use on site visits that are a hallmark of many ENR project features. The Waterways Council, which advocates for inland ports and waterways, organized the site tour for a group that included Lacey, as well as various Chattanooga community and industry officials concerned with the lock.
The photos that Lacey shot added an extra dimension to his story, much of which dealt with the need for a new lock to be created because of the existing structure’s degraded concrete. Since it opened in 1940, the lock itself has expanded 1 ft in length and 4 in. in height due to the alkali-aggregate reaction. “The Corps staff was very open about the issues,” says Lacey, whose work has earned awards for everything from investigative and feature reporting to use of multimedia and photography. He joined ENR in 2022.
Based in Huntsville, Ala., where Redstone Arsenal, including NASA and its space-related contractors, dominate the economy, Lacey is well-located to reach the region’s busiest construction markets.
Lacey is also the perfect person to understand the importance of infrastructure in the life and commerce of American communities, having worked for newspapers in North Carolina, where he covered the growth and development of Asheville. As is common in newspaper careers, Lacey also covered school boards and town government, which provide him with a strong sense of what will resonate with ENR Southeast region readers as he evaluates projects and issues to write about.
Related to the Chickamauga lock feature, “there was just a lot of information” shared by the Corps of Engineers, he says, which made it “hard to stop writing” when he reached the roughly 1,100-word limit for his feature. You can read the story also online at enr.com/topics/233-southeast-construction-projects.
Richard Korman
Deputy Editor
