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How Inland Waterways Work
How Inland Waterways Work
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There is perhaps no single geographic feature that has advanced the American economy more
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than the Mississippi River. That’s because nowhere else on earth has a river been crafted into this
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long of a navigable, commercial waterway—nowhere else can one float a barge 1,800 miles or 2,900
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kilometers down a river without encountering one stretch of low-water, one bout of rapids,
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one rock in the way, one single obstacle to seamless, commercial navigation.
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And compounding this waterway’s supremacy is its tributaries—the Tennessee river extends
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navigability as far as Knoxville; the Arkansas as far as Tulsa; the Missouri to Sioux City;
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the Illinois to Chicago; and the Ohio extends almost a thousand river miles
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from the Mississippi, connecting Pittsburgh to all the rest of the Mississippi River region.
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The simple fact that goods from Pittsburgh, or Minneapolis, or Omaha, or anywhere else on this
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map can be transported, exclusively by barge, as far as New Orleans, then transferred onto
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ocean-going vessels bound for… anywhere cannot be overstated. Trucks can move a ton of cargo
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about 145 miles with a gallon of fuel. Trains, and the reduced friction borne out of steel on
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steel contact, extend that gallon to 477 miles. But the vessels used on the Mississippi are able
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to transport that same ton as far as 647 miles on a gallon of fuel. And the cost differential
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is even greater than the efficiency one due to scale—a single barge equals the capacity of 35
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rail cars or 134 trucks, but a single tug can push upwards of 30, sometimes even 40 barges,
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leading to tremendous economies of scale. By one estimate, while trucks cost an average
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of $5.35 per ton, per mile, and trains $2.53, tugs transport that same ton a mile at a cost
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of just 97 cents. The friction of difference just works differently in the United States.
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Especially because beyond the Mississippi and its tributaries, there’s still the entire Great
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Lakes system. The Soo Locks, in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, allow for navigation from Lake Superior
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to the rest of the Great Lakes. By some measures, these are America’s most important locks as nearly
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100% of the country’s Iron Core pellets pass through them on their way to lake-side processing
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plants in Indiana and Ohio. But if not carrying iron, a vessel from Duluth can float through
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Lake Huron, then Erie, take this Canadian canal system that bypasses the impassable Niagara Falls,
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then make its way through the St Lawrence Seaway System to access the Atlantic Ocean.
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Add on the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest, connecting inland ports as far
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as Idaho to the ocean; the Sacramento Deep Water Ship Channel, connecting California’s
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capital to San Francisco Bay; the Hudson River, extending navigability through New York state;
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and a few others, the US boasts over 12,000 miles or 19,000 kilometers of commercially
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navigable inland waterways—that’s a longer transportation system than the
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entire rail network of the United Kingdom. But perhaps the greatest indicator of just
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how important America’s inland waterways are is how involved the Federal government is in
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running them. DC doesn’t really run transportation systems—the rails are almost entirely privately
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owned, airports are primarily handled by local governments, even Interstates—the Federal
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network of highways—are just funded by DC, but actually owned and run by the states themselves.
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The Mississippi and these other navigable, inland waterways are a rare example of the Federal
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government actually running a transportation system on a day-to-day basis. Specifically,
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and perhaps bizarrely, it’s a branch of the Army—the Army Corps of Engineers—that’s
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responsible for keeping cargo on the river running. They build and run the locks,
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they dredge it and bolster its banks, and they’re allocated over a billion dollars a year to do it.
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And it's these locks that have quite literally kept the American agricultural industry alive.
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Brazil and the US, for example, are the world’s first and second largest soybean exporters,
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respectively—tightly competing with each other to sell massive volumes of the crop to massive,
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far-away buyers like China. But it’s remarkable that the US, with a GDP per capita eight times
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that of Brazil, is able to meaningfully compete in a global marketplace for a commodity,
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where the only thing that matters to a buyer is cost. But in Brazil, the majority of soybean is
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brought from farms to ocean ports by trucks, with most of the rest transported by train—both far
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costlier than barges. Only a tiny portion is transported by water as Brazil just does not
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have the inland waterway infrastructure that the US does. Most years, the cost of getting
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soybean from Brazil to China, for example, is far higher than that of the US—sometimes
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as much as double. US producers can therefore accept higher production costs since all they
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have to do is get their product to a river, and from there it can float all the way to Shanghai.
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But before any soy, chemical, or petroleum product is sent to intermingle with the world economy, it
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starts in a place like this harbor, where highway, railway, and river intersect and Travero’s
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Logistics Park Debeque sits. Here, goods, whether by belt and elevator or simple front loader are
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poured into a barge operator’s standardized, 195-foot by 35-foot barge, then lashed together
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with steel cables to another 14 barges and pushed out into the river by diesel powered tow boat.
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Compared to most commercial vessels, crews on these towboats are small—typically less than
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ten people, composed of a captain, a pilot, a cook, and some engineers and deck hands.
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Almost universally, they work 6-hour on, 6-hour off schedules, nonstop, for their entire time
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onboard—typically a 28-day stretch. In practice, a given deckhand might work from 5:30 to 11:30 am,
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then attempt to get some sleep before starting work again at 5:30 pm, before an abbreviated
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overnight rest starting at 11:30 pm. The only crew member that doesn’t follow this schedule is the
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cook, who will generally prepare meals to be ready for 45 or so minutes before and after the 5:30 am,
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11:30 am, and 5:30 pm transitions. Crew facilities are also basic. Outside
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of bedrooms, these boats might have a small gym, crew lounge, and galley,
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but that’s about it. After all, when working 12-hours a day, there’s really not much time
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left for anything but sleeping and eating. And there’s plenty that gets done in those
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12 hours-on. Just 16 miles or 25 kilometers down the river from Travero’s Logistics Park sits Lock
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and Dam no. 12. On the Upper Mississippi, there’s never more than a couple dozen miles to go before
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arriving to a lock and dam. Tows notify the lock master over radio when they’re about 30-minutes
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away, which gives the operator time to prepare the lock—filling it with water if a boat’s approaching
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from upstream, or draining if the opposite. Tow captains must approach each lock carefully,
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tightly lining up with the wall that marks its approach. After all, there is often a current,
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called an out-draft, pulling from the entrance of the lock towards the dam,
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since that’s where the water flows when the lock is closed. Getting sucked into this current can
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and sometimes does prove disastrous—it’ll trap a tow upstream of the dam and potentially destroy
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the structure—so captains will often have their own notes written down based
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on their experience through the years, reminding them of the particularities of each lock.
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But upon successful approach, a tug pushes its barges into the lock chamber—or at least, half
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of them. That’s because the Upper Mississippi has 600-foot locks, but the standard tow-size through
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this stretch is 15-barges in a three by five configuration, leading to an overall length of
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about a thousand feet. Therefore, deckhands have to spend about a half an hour splitting their tow
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in two before the lock master can even close the gates and start draining the chamber. That takes
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about another 20 minutes, then the first half of the tow gets floated out and tied up as the second
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half, including the tug itself, waits another 20 minutes for the chamber to fill up with water
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again. Next, after another 20-minute draining cycle, it takes about an hour for deckhands to put
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the tow back together, leading to a roughly three to four hour process of getting through each and
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every lock—and that’s if they’re lucky. The locks each operate on a first-come, first-served system,
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meaning if there’s another vessel going through, a tow has to wait up to 3-4 hours before it can
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go through the 3-4 hour process. In the peak fall grain export season, these delays can
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really compound and limit the throughput of the river just when it’s needed most.
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And it’s along this process, passing lock after lock, where it becomes impossible to ignore
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that the Mississippi, nor the Illinois for that matter, nor the Columbia, nor the upper Danube,
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nor the lower Nile are strictly rivers any more. It’s one thing for a river to be deemed navigable
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in its simplest definition: to be sailed by ships or boats, but it's another to live up
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to the haughty standards of what navigable is to, say the US Army Corps of Engineers,
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whose definition hinges not on the possibility of making it up or down a river but the continued,
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consistent, reliability of travel along the river for the purpose of commerce.
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Rivers, no matter the state, country, or continent, are just fickle. Changing shape
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and course by the season and the year, they’re difficult to govern physically and politically.
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Consider just the task of defining what the Mississippi river really is. At base,
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you could start with this map. But that wouldn’t consider some of its most important tributaries
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such as these. And still, this is oversimplified, as supplying a river that on average moves nearly
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500,000 cubic feet of water through it every single second, requires the tributaries of
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these tributaries, along with the unseen groundwater from across the river’s entire
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basin draining eventually into this cumulative flow. From this more holistic—albeit, far from
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exhaustive—view of the river, the Mississippi river’s an assemblage of gravity-fed water from
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41% of the lower 48’s landmass spread across 32 American states and two Canadian provinces. As
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an amalgamation of precipitation spread across thousands of miles, the river’s disposition is
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defined by its broader basin. Massive rain here, for instance, could lead to flooding along the
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river below, as it did in 1927 when a swollen Mississippi killed 500 and left hundreds of
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thousands displaced. Massive earthquakes here, could fundamentally reshape the river’s path,
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as they did in 1811 and 1812. And a low snow year here, and hot dry summer here could bring
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flows down to levels so low that it threatens grain shipping in the fall, as they did in 2012.
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On the inverse, what a river does provide that an interstate or rail line can’t is the efficiency
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boost of buoyancy, and what a river offers that a canal can’t, is the natural plumbing—which, while
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not perfectly streamlined nor always dependable, provides a far more advanced starting point.
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To first turn a river into a navigable waterway capable of powering international commerce,
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there needs to be a legal framework as to who has purview over the river. In the US,
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beginning in the 1800s as the fledgling federal government scrambled to create effective efficient
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means of transportation to spur on economic activity, the responsibility of turning natural
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features into navigable ones fell on the US Army Corps of Engineers. On the Mississippi,
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their work began with this, the designation of the Mississippi River Commission and the exploratory
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mission to figure out how its flows could be harnessed for the purposes of interstate trade.
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First, the goal was to provide, from the upper river below, a consistent 4-foot or 1.3 meter
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deep channel. As time went on, the ask grew. Then it was a 4.5 foot-deep channel, then a consistent
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6-foot deep channel, then finally, with the rivers and harbors act of 1930, a 9-foot or 3-meter deep
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channel. For the river’s upper reaches, this meant significant reconfiguration.
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Split at St. Louis, the Mississippi River has two rather distinct dispositions. From
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St. Paul to St. Louis, the river moves quicker, it’s smaller in stature, and it’s comparatively
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steep—dropping 400 feet or 120 meters over 670 miles or 1100 kilometers. Or it was. Now, just
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about wherever you zoom in on this upper section it looks pretty uniform, it’s wide, it’s smooth,
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and every couple dozen miles, it’s dammed. These dams and accompanying locks, all 27, aren’t for
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storage or flood control, but for transportation, representing a massive 1930s federal investment in
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turning a wild river into a consistent canal for the benefit of midwestern agricultural exporters
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upon which the whole region still relies. Some ninety years on, the corps of engineers still
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maintains and operates these locks, and in the intermediate decades, they’ve expanded to
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account for 192 navigational locks nationwide. The locks end at St. Louis, not long after the
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Mississippi has added the flow of the Illinois and just before it adds the Ohio. And it’s here where
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the river’s character flips. From Cairo, Illinois to Vicksburg, Mississippi the river has only
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600 miles to travel to the Gulf Coast. But with only 300 feet or 100 meters of elevation to drop
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across that entire stretch, the river restlessly meanders across its massive historical floodplain,
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creating a winding path to the ocean that stretches out to about 1,000 miles or 1,600
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kilometers. Through the lower Mississippi average flows are high enough to deem navigational locks
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and dams unnecessary, but with so much water and so many bends along a flat landscape come
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other challenges for the corps of engineers. If one is to drive along a county road along the
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lower Mississippi, there's a good chance they can’t see it, that it’s on the other side of
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a grassy mound. If one is to look at the lower Mississippi from above, there’s a good chance
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they’ll notice that these grassy mounds don’t meander like the river, but make unnatural,
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calculated, perfectly straight lines across the landscape. These are the over 2,000 miles
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of levee, built primarily by the Army Corps of Engineers, that millions count on to keep the
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flooding Mississippi out of their towns and homes when it does dump in the upper reaches in the
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basin, and that barge operators count on to keep the Mississippi in a single, dependable channel.
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Of course, levees, while noticeable to the trained eye, are easy to miss. The same can
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be said about the locks and dams, just relatively low-lying structures spread along what seems to be
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a reasonably slow and easy-to-contain section of river. Like the structures, the continued
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upkeep of the river is easy to overlook, too. Dredging, afterall, isn’t terribly visible
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to the outside observer, it’s moving sand and silt and sediment from a river bottom. And yet,
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continued dredging to keep the channel at 9 feet deep from 2014 to 2023 in the upper Mississippi
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cost on average $45 million a year. The same goes for revetment, the process of stabilizing river
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banks with concrete matting—it’s difficult to notice unless you put it in, and yet,
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the Armor 1, a vessel tasked with laying down the matting to hold the river in place for another
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50 years cost a reported $125 million. All that’s to say, while rightly paraded
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as a geographic super power, navigable waterways are hardly natural systems;
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they’re expensive-to-maintain hybrids with a heavy human touch. And in the case of most around the
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US, the critical human additions that make these safe and reliable for the frailest of barges and
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towboats are often overlooked and getting really old. Take locks—with most being built mid-century,
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or in the case of those along the Mississippi even earlier, nearly all have outlived their
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estimated 50-year expected lifespan. While still operational, they’re increasingly unreliable.
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As a 2023 Department of Transportation report noted, from 2010 to 2020, across 192 lock sites,
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while total lockages have declined, the percentage of vessels delayed has climbed from the 30s into
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the 50s. More problematic: the average delay tripled in duration from 2010 to 2019. And
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while shipping companies can mitigate problems when it comes to planned delays, in 2020, about a
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third of all lock delays were unscheduled. In the American Society of Civil Engineers’ most recent
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infrastructure report card, inland waterways received a D+ while noting that the Army Corps of
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Engineers reports both a $6.8 billion backlog on projects that have been approved but not financed,
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and $2.7 billion annually on funds not received to do annual required maintenance. Making things
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even more difficult, and inland rivers even less dependable is less consistent weather
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and increasingly common and increasingly extreme weather events. The Mississippi has had low water
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years in 2012, in 2013, in 2022, ‘23, and ‘24 for instance, while also massively flooding in 2019.
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Then there’s the fact that fundamentally, the locks along most American rivers are just too
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small to serve today’s purposes. Much discussion is made over whether the Federal
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Government should upgrade the river to 1,200 foot locks—the size that could allow Upper Mississippi
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tows to make their way through in just one cycle, rather than two. This would increase
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throughput enormously—the three or more hour process of passing a lock would go by in just
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30 or so minutes, saving days of time across one Minneapolis to St Louis journey. Delays
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at the locks, waiting for other traffic to clear, would become a thing of the past and
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shipping rates might go down, allowing an ever-so-slightly expanded profit margin for
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farmers in Illinois and Iowa and beyond. And in fact, we’ll even get to see what
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this looks like in practice. Construction has started at lock 25, just north of St Louis,
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to build a brand-new 1,200-foot lock. Funding was secured as part of the Biden Administration’s
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Infrastructure Act, and construction is expected to be completed… sometime in the 2030s. Also,
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the total amount allocated for the project was $732 million. That’s to say, upgrading the entire
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Upper Mississippi’s locks would possibly be a project rivaling the annual budget of NASA.
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And it’s not like there’s a lot of revenue that can pay for these upgrades. The Mississippi is
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completely free to use—including its locks. They’ll open and close for any vessel,
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commercial or recreational, without charging a cent… at least directly. The Federal Government
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does charge a 29 cent per gallon tax on fuel used by commercial barges on designated inland
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waterways in most circumstances, which goes into a trust fund that is primarily used for construction
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projects on the waterways, rather than operations. So in 2020, for example, $131 million of the
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Army Corps of Engineering’s spending on inland waterways came from this fund, but this was out
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of a total annual cost of $1.3 billion. So that’s to say, the inland waterways effectively act as a
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massive subsidy from the American taxpayer to its users—particularly, to the agriculture industry.
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One could, and some do argue that this is unfair—for everyone to pay for a system
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that only benefits the few. This argument is bolstered by the fact that what these
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waterways are particularly good at is getting bulk quantities of grain and soybean and other
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agricultural products to New Orleans to be transferred onto an ocean-going ship for
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international export. That’s to say, in extreme cases, American taxpayers are paying to expand the
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profit margins of agribusinesses selling their soybean to China. This is true—unlike roads,
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there is no significant, direct utility for this transportation system for the general public.
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But right now, the Mississippi is in this state where it’s extraordinarily expensive to run,
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but it’s also underfunded. America does rely on it. While some of its utility is enjoyed by all
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the foreign countries that buy American crops, it simultaneously secures the domestic food supply;
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it transports raw materials that sit at the start of the supply chain for other industries; in fact,
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it’s estimated that each day the river closes due to lock failure, for example,
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costs the American economy $300 million. But despite that, it’s simultaneously
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underutilized. Far fewer barges traverse its stretch today than in decades past as freight
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traffic has moved onto the rails and roads. The rails and road systems are being stretched to
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their limits—freight railroads are suffering from capacity shortages and fast-deteriorating
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infrastructure due to their unwillingness to invest in capital improvements, while the trucking
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industry is suffering from a driver shortage as young people are unwilling to work in the
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increasingly aged industry. There has been plenty of discussion over developing a network of ports
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and vessels capable of transporting container cargo up and down the river so it can act as a
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direct competitor to freight rail and trucks, but so far little has translated into action.
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The issues of inefficiency and deterioration on the Mississippi are so well-recognized that barge
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operators themselves successfully advocated to be taxed more—they were the driving force behind
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the hike from 20 to 29 cents per gallon in 2014 because they so desperately wanted maintenance
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and upgrades. But it still wasn’t even close to enough. Right now, the Mississippi and America’s
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other inland waterways are funded and functional enough that they’re relied upon by whole
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industries and responsible for the economic ascent of entire regions, but not funded enough that
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they actually function even close to their full potential. That’s to say, they're great enough
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to have changed the entire course of American history, but they’re still just not great.
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One thing I noticed while researching this video is that quite a few academics have
20:28
attempted to solve the issue of Mississippi River lock delays using data science—after all,
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even the busiest locks are used well below their theoretical capacity, but still experience delays
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due to a lack of traffic management. This is a great example of how knowledge in STEM subjects
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