The Dredge Report

With the hottest summer on record, fires raging out of control from exceptionally dry forests, dwindling water reserves and a drought that has gripped most of our farming regions (we haven’t seen a drought in the mid-West like this since the 1936 Dust Bowl era), you’d think this is all bad enough. But there is one more huge slam to the wall that most of us who don’t live by a big navigable river are likely to think of… but it does increase costs to the consumer because it takes more time to ship goods this way: the water table for many of our great rivers has fallen so much that the nine foot minimum draft required for barges to traverse these waterways has become difficult to maintain.

The Mississippi is the “poster river” for this debacle, and whether one believes that this is just one part of an ever-changing cycle or a new fact of life that will only grow worse with climate change, we really do depend on this waterway, and we haven’t seen water levels this low since 1940. The closest such strain on the system was back in 1988. The current water level has fallen by as many as 20 feet in some places. “A historic drought and excessive heat have reduced water levels and scorched wide sections of the U.S. Midwest. Flooding last year may have worsened the situation on the Mississippi by leaving deposits of silt and debris in areas that would normally be clear.” CNN.com, August 21^st.

The economic costs can be staggering as well, especially if the river were to be closed to water traffic for a long period of time. “[C]onsidering the fact that approximately 60 percent of our grain, 22 percent of our oil and natural gas, and one-fifth of our coal travel down the Mississippi River, that would be absolutely crippling for our economy.” DailyPaul.com, August 15^th. “More than 400,000 U.S. jobs depend on the flow of river traffic, and each day that traffic on the river stops, the U.S. economy loses $300 million.” ABC.com, August 21^st.

It’s mostly down to one lane now, and northbound and southbound traffic alternate (one during daylight hours, the other at night), but the delays are monumental. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineer’s is keeping its aging fleet of dredges sucking out silt and spewing it off to the side pretty much constantly, knowing that if that nine foot level cannot be maintained at any time, traffic must come to a complete halt. A couple of boats have hit bottom in the channel, but they made it through, and traffic around parts of Mississippi has actually been stopped pending dredging. About 100 boats were sitting still, waiting in line as operations focused on deepening a critical part of the channel on August 20^th. An 11-mile stretch area around Greenville has been prone to these intermittent stops, particularly since August 12^th, but sections from the northern reaches in Wisconsin and Minnesota down to the area around New Orleans have seen traffic stops since August 2^nd. The last massive pile up happened around Greenville on August 26^th, and the Corps halted all traffic as they dredged a deeper channel.

A number of ports along the way, including four of the nineteen largest (eight more are in jeopardy), are no longer useable. Barge trains (“tows”) are shorter, carrying fewer goods. And one more ugly issue has come up: “The volume of water coming down the river is so much lower than normal this summer that a wedge of salt water is creeping up the Mississippi toward New Orleans, imperiling local water supplies drawn from the river. The corps is building a sill — basically, a dam of sediment — in the river below New Orleans low enough to block the flow of salt water while letting boats pass.” New York Times, August 19^th.

Riverboat pilots have seen bits and pieces of this before, may not quite so bad, but the big question is whether this is just a bad year or two… or if this is just the beginning of a new reality. With the Mississippi gathering 40% of this nations entire water flow, it is indeed the “river to watch” in the coming years.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the combination of political and natural disasters “flowing” all the time can most certainly seem overwhelming.