The Fox Point Hurricane Barrier boasts three of the most impressive tainter gates of their kind. Working with local engineering firms, The Army Corps of Engineers designed the gates during the initial stages of the barrier's development in the late 1950s. Tower Iron Works of Seekonk, MA fabricated them despite a protracted labor dispute that actually put the barrier project months behind schedule. As dictated by the Tainter design, from the side each gate looks like a healthy slice of pie with the crust facing the bay and a triangle pointing towards the city. Gates are wedges with a cut cylinder as the wall and triangular arms extending back from each end. The arms converge upon a trunnion that serves as a pivot when the gates are moved. It is the arcing walls and minimal pivot that endows this design with its superiority over other models like the roller gate. The arc makes the gates easier to move in the water by reducing resistance while the single trunnnion decreases friction. If meticulously manufactured, these gates are more reliable and efficient than most other designs. Each arcing wall on Fox Point's gates is forty feet by fort feet. Each unit weighs fifty-three tons. The gates can be lowered by three-horsepower electrical motors or manually, by releasing a break. The structures are attached to the motors by prodigious chains similar in design to those on a bicycle, but quite different in scale- each link is about a foot long. It takes about thirty minutes for the gates to be lowered and about two hours for them to be raised.

History of the tainter gate

The conduits on Providence's barrier would not work and appear as they do, had it not been for the innovations made during the 9-Foot Channel Project. In 1930, the U.S. Congress allocated funds for the construction of twenty-nine locks and dams, thirteen small boat harbors, and five commercial harbors and turning basins located throughout the Upper Mississippi River. The system of locks and dams is the project's most significant feature. It allows commercial navigation of the entire Upper Mississippi by maintaining a water level of at least nine feet throughout the entire river. The project was completed in 1950, but work in the area and on the facilities has not stopped since because the structures and the bodies of water they created require constant maintenance and testing.

Radial gates, the precursor to tainter gates, existed in dams constructed at least a century