The Dredge Report

I’ve blogged about water overflow, and today, I’d like to address water underflow. Specifically, I want to look at the miracle of the Mississippi River, where water levels are staggeringly low by reason of the prolonged drought that has imperiled so much of West and the Mid-West. It’s a very important waterway to our overall economy. 60% of our gain, 22% of the oil and gas we use and about 20% of our coal, etc. – a total commodity/product value of an estimated $300 million a day – move down this magnificent river. But parts of the river have resulted in slowdowns and stoppages because barges have been close to bottoming out. The Army Corps of Engineers has been dredging as quickly as they can, and so far, their work has kept that waterway open for business.

As the Corps has said, “it’s a game of inches.” How have they done it? “The fact that the river has remained open for business along the critical ‘Middle Miss’ — the 200 miles between the Mississippi’s last dam-and-locks structure, above St. Louis, down to Cairo, Ill., where the plentiful Ohio River flows in — stems from a remarkable feat of engineering that involved months of nonstop dredging, blasting and scraping away of rock obstructions along the riverbed, effectively lowering the bottom of the channel by two feet. It has also involved exacting use of reservoirs along the vast river system that were initially designed by engineers using slide rules nearly 100 years ago to try to manage both flood and drought, as well as rock structures placed in recent years along the bank to direct water and speed it up, a bit like a thumb over the end of a garden hose.

“During the most delicate weeks of the low-water crisis, the corps ordered its engineers and water managers to tweak upstream reservoirs, with some staff members waking up every two hours through the night to check river levels and to release precise amounts of water as needed, without wasting a drop.” New York Times, January 17^th.

But the underlying message to us all is clear. All of the assumptions we have made about our environment, our view of how we will live and cope in the future, are materially altering every day. Global climate change is here and accelerating much faster than even the most pessimistic scientists predicted a decade ago. It seems that the more rapidly the polar ice melts, the more dark land and sea is exposed... and dark mass absorbs heat where once white mass reflected it away. That heat absorption simply adds more warmth to the system, thus resulting in the record warmth all over this planet beyond anything in recorded human history.

Bad air and polluted water almost anywhere flows across borders that nature simply doesn’t recognize. Pollution in China corrodes property in Korea... and eventually even Europe and the United States. The warming caused by China’s massive use of coal to generate electricity is most certainly not confined to China. For folks in the conservative “red states” who really want to curtail government spending, representatives who had to be dragged kicking and screaming by east-coast Republicans to support hurricane relief monies for Superstorm Sandy victims, they should simply address their own reality: the treasured waterway that moves goods through or near their lands cannot function without massive government expenditures. The seemingly never-ending drought that has parched farmland from Texas to the Dakotas, from Kansas to east Washington will require sympathy and economic aid to those who are suffering. The depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer, that large underground body of water that sits under a vast portion of the Mid-West, will only make those farms even more vulnerable.

In short, it’s not red vs. blue. Coastal communities vs. interior farmland. Or fiscal conservatives vs. liberal spenders. We can cut our budgets if that is what the majority of Americans really want, but most certainly we are all in this together. It is a common problem that may impact each of us differently, but impact each of us it will. We can either agree to deal with this as a nation, with empathy and sympathy for all, or agree to be equally unfeeling and callous to all.

I’m Peter Dekom, and do we only pull together as Americans when someone declares war on us or can we face other comparable difficulties with the powerful unity that once defined us as a nation?