SALON

Sunday, Jan 13, 2013 2:00 AM UTC

Mississippi rock blasting puts river in ship shape

By

Topics: From the Wires,

ST. LOUIS (AP) — Crews have completed the most critical phase of removing bedrock that threatened barges along a crucial stretch of the drought-starved Mississippi River, staving off the shipping industry’s fears that the treacherous channel could close to traffic, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Saturday.

Using excavators and explosives, corps-hired contractors cleared 365 cubic yards of limestone and added two vital feet of depth to the channel near Thebes, Ill., about 130 miles south of St. Louis, the corps said. That phase, which began last month, addressed the most pressing threat to mariners and additional rock removal is expected nearby, the corps said.

“The river rock removal contractors executed their work quickly and efficiently in the primary areas of concern,” said Maj. Gen. John Peabody, commander of the corps’ Mississippi Valley division. “The work has deepened the channel enough to successfully maintain navigation though this critical reach of the river.”

While averting a potentially crippling shutdown of the river, the work wasn’t without its inconvenience to shippers. Barge traffic at that stretch has been limited to an eight-hour window each day, causing bottlenecks and slowing transit times of cargo as crews removed the jagged bedrock that threatened to tear barge bottoms to ribbons.

Still, the corps said Saturday, 630 vessels and 6,123 barges managed to make their way through during the rock extraction work.

Barge operators in recent days credited the corps’ hustle in addressing the bedrock months ahead of schedule, keeping open the stretch on the river that’s an artery used to move everything from corn to grain to construction materials and petroleum. The corps also has strategically released water from lakes into the Mississippi to raise the river in recent weeks, trying to blunt the effects of the worst U.S. drought in decades that has made the river narrower and shallower.

“The Army Corps of Engineers has done a great job of pulling rabbits out of their hat,” Rick Calhoun, president of Cargo Carriers, Cargill Inc.’s shipping arm with 1,300 barges, told The Associated Press as crews were closing in on finishing the first phase of the rock clearing. “We believed it was an oncoming crisis, and by hook and by crook it hasn’t gotten as bad as we thought. That’s great news.”

The barge industry is still pressing for U.S. government help from the Missouri River, which feeds into the Mississippi at St. Louis. The agency cut the flow of the Missouri into the Mississippi in November and has rebuffed the industry’s pleas that the flow from a South Dakota dam be restored, saying the pullback was needed to protect interests on the upper Missouri.

Barge operators hope that if the corps can keep the Mississippi passable for the next month or so, spring rains, snow melt and the back-to-normal release from the Missouri could raise the Mississippi, erasing any lingering worries about shipping.

Shipping groups have warned that if the waterway there were to drop to a point in which barge weight restrictions were further tightened, shipping would effectively stop. Drafts, or the portion of each barge that is submerged, already are limited to 9 feet in the middle Mississippi, down from 12 feet. Trade group officials say that if drafts are restricted to 8 feet or lower, many operators will stop shipping.

While lessening cargo weight helps barges ride higher, shipping costs increase because more barges are required to move the cargo and tow boats go through more fuel because more trips become necessary.

More By Jim Suhr.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 0 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
191 points192 points | 7 comments
vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the persecuted late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
138 points139 points | comment
vote
Obstruction will ruin the GOP: Playing politics and abusing the system can excite the extremes, but it's a recipe for long-term political disaster
48 points49 points | 8 comments
vote
Loaded terminology like "entitlements" and "welfare" skews the debate and alters America. How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government.
34 points35 points | 16 comments
vote
With the help of Photoshop, artist Yao Lu has made shanshui — traditional ink paintings — of China's landfills
19 points20 points | comment

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations