Repair work at remote Florida fort promises to be a lonely job

DRY TORTUGAS NATIONAL PARK, Fla. -- Just about every day for the last 150 years, Fort Jefferson has been slowly giving way. The embedded ironwork is rusting and expanding outward. Red bricks, one after the other, fall into the moat. Raindrops sneak in through thick gashes in the walls.

The National Park Service is now forced to play defense in the war nature is waging against the coastal fort that once seemed indestructible, standing on a spit of land 68 miles west of Key West.

Today, in order to prevent further deterioration of the structure, which has been eaten away by tropical salt air and heat, the National Park Service will begin looking for more than a dozen masonry workers willing to come to the Dry Tortugas and begin work on the first phase of a $16 million face lift for the nation's most isolated fort.

But for the winning contractor, there will be a few logistical snags.

The masonry crew will be expected to work day in and day out for close to a year and supply their own housing, food, water, electricity, and sanitation, said Mike Jester, the chief of maintenance for Everglades and Dry Tortugas National Parks. And there are other sacrifices: no calls to your sweetheart back home or Web-surfing since there isn't any phone service on the island.

Still, it could be a dream job, at least for a little while: A tropical island workplace with water so clear you can see to the bottom, miles away from your in-laws, rush-hour traffic, telemarketers. But Jester admits, "life out there can get pretty boring."

No grocery shopping, pizza delivery, or a place to cash a paycheck.

Key West is a two-hour ferryboat or a 30-minute seaplane ride away. "You feel pretty deprived," Jester said. "It's a beautiful place, but it's a costly place to do business. So you better not forget anything."

"These days are going to be long, hot, and tedious," he added.

Scuba diving, fishing, and bird-watching attract more than 90,000 visitors a year, and the island's 12 residents can use the company. "It gets lonely out here sometimes," said Mike Ryan, the park's lead interpretive ranger, who lives in a converted gun room with his wife, another park employee. "You feel far from everything."

But the winning contractor will experience the artful engineering of the fort, not to mention the history of the place.

The fort was built, along with other coastal forts, in response to the War of 1812. When construction began in the 1840s, Fort Jefferson was part of an American defense system that sent a strong message to other countries: The United States wanted to be left alone.

"We were afraid of the English," said Tom Hambright, a Florida Keys historian.

The fort was built primarily by civilian employees and slaves in order to protect one of the most strategic anchorages in the country, historians say. The United States, young and vulnerable, wanted to control navigation to the Gulf of Mexico and keep a watchful eye on the shipping lanes in and out of the Mississippi River.

"The location of the Tortugas was one of the greatest assets to the military," Ryan said.

Over the years, the 45-foot-high fort, constructed with more than 16 million bricks, seemed to serve its purpose. "It was an engineering accomplishment," Hambright said. Gunfire was never exchanged, and historians believe no enemy even attempted to come by it.

Even though construction continued for 30 years and was never finished, the $3 million fort was built with the latest technologies of the time. Gas-triggered shutters would open as 25-ton guns prepared to fire large cannonballs as far as 3 miles away. Then, almost instantly, the shutters would close, protecting the soldiers inside.

"The fort was the ultimate weapon of its time," Ryan said. "It was the most powerful deterrent. There was nothing like it."

But the fort became obsolete as weaponry advanced and its walls could be penetrated, Ryan said. To make matters worse, the monstrous structure started to sink in the sand, destroying the underground cisterns and the storage for rainwater used for drinking.

Despite these problems, Fort Jefferson later served as a Union military prison during the Civil War, housing Samuel Mudd. Mudd was the doctor who set the leg of John Wilkes Booth after Booth assassinated President Lincoln in Ford's Theater in Washington and was injured when he jumped from the presidential box to the stage.

But in 1874, the army abandoned the fort after a hurricane tore through the barracks and it became plagued with substantial yellow fever epidemics and construction problems.