The towboat American Beauty churns northward up the Mississippi River at 4 1/2 m.p.h.–pretty good time for a vessel pushing a load of barges roughly as long as the Hancock Building is tall. But now it’s approaching Lock and Dam No. 22, and progress will dramatically slow.
“This is a bad deal here,” drawls Shane Price, the river boat’s taciturn captain, as the lock comes into view.
Many people want the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to make Lock 22 and similar locks on the Mississippi less of a bad deal for river traffic. Many others don’t. Fixing the locks, environmentalists say, is a billion-dollar boondoggle designed to benefit powerful agricultural interests.
“No industry has been better at tapping into the federal taxpayer’s pocket than the agribusiness industry,” says Mark Beorkram, of the environmental group Mississippi River Basin Alliance.
Obscure as the tussle may seem at first glance, the potential stakes are high.
“This river system is linked to our economic structure in the Midwest,” says Christopher Brescia, head of the Midwest Area River Coalition 2000, the organization promoting the lock project. Directly or indirectly, “over 400,000 Main Street USA jobs exist in part because of the movement of goods” on the Midwestern waterway.
Organized labor backs the job-rich project. But opponents say the Mississippi, an icon of American history, will be further degraded if the project goes through.
Even after almost a decade of studies, fact-finding, deliberation and disputation, there’s no quick resolution in sight. Just like Old Man River, it seems, the controversy over upgrading the Mississippi’s outdated locks just keeps rolling along.
At the site Price’s craft is approaching, 8 miles downstream from Hannibal, Mo., a low dam blocks the river, one of more than a score of such barriers that control the Upper Mississippi. On the Missouri side of the river, the lock will lift the barges about 8 feet, permitting the American Beauty to end-run the dam.
Because it’s the only way to proceed upstream, the lock is a decidedly mixed blessing for Price and his eight crew members. The problem? Passing through it is a labor-intensive, time-consuming chore that will slow the sturdy push-boat and its flotilla of empty barges.
The difficulty is straightforward enough: Lock 22 was built nearly 70 years ago to handle boats up to 600 feet in length. But Price’s 170-foot-long boat, when combined with its burden of barges, measures nearly 1,200 feet. In fact, almost all the barge “tows” that ply the Upper Mississippi are of that same standard length, just a tad longer than a Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
In order to pass through the too-short lock, the crew will have to break the tied-together packet of barges in half, move each half through the lock separately, then tie the parts back together on the upstream side.
The barges are lashed with a skein of tightly drawn steel cables, and although the crew moves through the all-too-familiar uncoupling and re-coupling procedure with choreographed efficiency, the process still requires nearly two hours to complete–in good weather.
During the time it takes the American Beauty to makes its cumbersome passage through the lock, two southbound barge tows have approached and begun to idle at designated spots along the riverbank, much like suburban mini-vans line the curb outside an elementary school when class is dismissed.
When river traffic is heavy during the autumn harvest season, notes Price, it’s not unusual to see a dozen or more tows queued up at a single lock. “You could spend two days here, waiting your turn.”
To the river-transportation industry, and to its customers in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors, the solution is as straightforward as the problem: They want the Corps of Engineers to replace seven 600-foot locks on the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers with 1,200-foot versions. Without the need to break up the barges, tows would be able to make a lock passage in only 20 minutes.
Eliminating some of the waterway’s worst choke points with longer locks would probably cost about $1.5 billion, but backers in the agricultural sector contend such a project would be worth every penny.
River transportation delays caused by the old-fashioned locks “have increased the cost of agricultural commodities, lowered farm income and made our exports more expensive,” says John Skorburg, senior economist with the American Farm Bureau Federation.
Proponents figure slowdowns at the locks add about $94 million yearly to the cost of river shipping. Those costs, they contend, are eventually passed on to farmers and grain companies who ship corn and soybeans downriver to export facilities in New Orleans. More than half the grain exported from the U.S. passes down the Mississippi each year. The delay costs are also absorbed by other producers who rely on barges as the cheapest way to ship bulky, low-margin products like fertilizer, road salt, gravel and cement.
Backers say barges are an environmentally friendly transport option. A 15-barge tow carries as much cargo as 870 semi trucks, but consumes significantly less fuel and produces a lot less pollution than the truck convoy would. “If we don’t provide for growth on the river,” says the river coalition’s Brescia, “then we’ll have to provide for growth on the roads and rails.”
Not everybody is on board with the bigger-is-better concept for locks. Nor does everyone take to the idea of the nation’s mightiest river serving as the centerpiece of a low-cost, bulk transport system.
For too long, critics argue, the lock-and-dam system by which the government tamed the Mississippi and transformed it into a series of pools, has been treated like a barge canal, an aquatic superhighway, rather than as a threatened ecosystem.
Because the dams slow the flow of the river, silt suspended in the water drops to the bottom, filling in ecologically sensitive bayous and backwaters; that can disturb the spawning of fish and aquatic birds.
The wake from barge traffic erodes the riverbanks in some areas. And many sections of the river are bereft of any underwater vegetation, critics assert, because as the tows move up and down the Mississippi, their propellers stir up so much silt that sunlight can’t get through to nourish plant life. The corps first began examining the idea of expanding the locks in 1992. Before it undertakes any such construction project, it must determine through an elaborate review that the plan is financially justified. Early on, corps officials spent several years and about $60 million compiling data on barge traffic, alternative transport options, environmental effects and other factors.
Late last year, however, it altered the format to include input from numerous warring constituencies. In July, it issued its interim report on the feasibility. A year from now, a draft study is due. And in 2004, the corps will issue its recommendation.
The environmental community acknowledges “commercial navigation is here to stay” on the Mississippi. The long fight over the lock expansion study came about because the corps initially failed to give ecological interests equal weight with commercial interests, as the law requires, says Beorkram, of the River Alliance. On board the American Beauty, the politically tinged tussle over the locks seems distant. As the boat positions the front half of the barge packet in the lock, deckhands talk by radio to the pilot house far in the rear.
“Last wire,” one calls out as they finish breaking the tow in two. The boat begins to back out. Looking down from the lock, an elderly couple has been observing the operation. “Won’t it fit?” asks the woman.
“The lock’s too small,” calls out Brescia. “They’ve got to make it bigger. Write your congressman.”
