How Inland Waterways Work

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0:00There is perhaps no single geographic feature that has advanced the American economy more

0:05than the Mississippi River. That’s because nowhere else on earth has a river been crafted into this

0:11long of a navigable, commercial waterway—nowhere else can one float a barge 1,800 miles or 2,900

0:18kilometers down a river without encountering one stretch of low-water, one bout of rapids,

0:23one rock in the way, one single obstacle to seamless, commercial navigation.

0:28And compounding this waterway’s supremacy is its tributaries—the Tennessee river extends

0:33navigability as far as Knoxville; the Arkansas as far as Tulsa; the Missouri to Sioux City;

0:38the Illinois to Chicago; and the Ohio extends almost a thousand river miles

0:43from the Mississippi, connecting Pittsburgh to all the rest of the Mississippi River region.

0:49The simple fact that goods from Pittsburgh, or Minneapolis, or Omaha, or anywhere else on this

0:54map can be transported, exclusively by barge, as far as New Orleans, then transferred onto

0:59ocean-going vessels bound for… anywhere cannot be overstated. Trucks can move a ton of cargo

1:05about 145 miles with a gallon of fuel. Trains, and the reduced friction borne out of steel on

1:10steel contact, extend that gallon to 477 miles. But the vessels used on the Mississippi are able

1:17to transport that same ton as far as 647 miles on a gallon of fuel. And the cost differential

1:24is even greater than the efficiency one due to scale—a single barge equals the capacity of 35

1:30rail cars or 134 trucks, but a single tug can push upwards of 30, sometimes even 40 barges,

1:37leading to tremendous economies of scale. By one estimate, while trucks cost an average

1:42of $5.35 per ton, per mile, and trains $2.53, tugs transport that same ton a mile at a cost

1:50of just 97 cents. The friction of difference just works differently in the United States.

1:57Especially because beyond the Mississippi and its tributaries, there’s still the entire Great

2:02Lakes system. The Soo Locks, in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, allow for navigation from Lake Superior

2:08to the rest of the Great Lakes. By some measures, these are America’s most important locks as nearly

2:13100% of the country’s Iron Core pellets pass through them on their way to lake-side processing

2:18plants in Indiana and Ohio. But if not carrying iron, a vessel from Duluth can float through

2:22Lake Huron, then Erie, take this Canadian canal system that bypasses the impassable Niagara Falls,

2:28then make its way through the St Lawrence Seaway System to access the Atlantic Ocean.

2:32Add on the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest, connecting inland ports as far

2:36as Idaho to the ocean; the Sacramento Deep Water Ship Channel, connecting California’s

2:40capital to San Francisco Bay; the Hudson River, extending navigability through New York state;

2:44and a few others, the US boasts over 12,000 miles or 19,000 kilometers of commercially

2:50navigable inland waterways—that’s a longer transportation system than the

2:54entire rail network of the United Kingdom. But perhaps the greatest indicator of just

3:00how important America’s inland waterways are is how involved the Federal government is in

3:04running them. DC doesn’t really run transportation systems—the rails are almost entirely privately

3:10owned, airports are primarily handled by local governments, even Interstates—the Federal

3:15network of highways—are just funded by DC, but actually owned and run by the states themselves.

3:20The Mississippi and these other navigable, inland waterways are a rare example of the Federal

3:25government actually running a transportation system on a day-to-day basis. Specifically,

3:30and perhaps bizarrely, it’s a branch of the Army—the Army Corps of Engineers—that’s

3:34responsible for keeping cargo on the river running. They build and run the locks,

3:38they dredge it and bolster its banks, and they’re allocated over a billion dollars a year to do it.

3:44And it's these locks that have quite literally kept the American agricultural industry alive.

3:49Brazil and the US, for example, are the world’s first and second largest soybean exporters,

3:54respectively—tightly competing with each other to sell massive volumes of the crop to massive,

3:58far-away buyers like China. But it’s remarkable that the US, with a GDP per capita eight times

4:03that of Brazil, is able to meaningfully compete in a global marketplace for a commodity,

4:08where the only thing that matters to a buyer is cost. But in Brazil, the majority of soybean is

4:13brought from farms to ocean ports by trucks, with most of the rest transported by train—both far

4:19costlier than barges. Only a tiny portion is transported by water as Brazil just does not

4:25have the inland waterway infrastructure that the US does. Most years, the cost of getting

4:29soybean from Brazil to China, for example, is far higher than that of the US—sometimes

4:34as much as double. US producers can therefore accept higher production costs since all they

4:39have to do is get their product to a river, and from there it can float all the way to Shanghai.

4:44But before any soy, chemical, or petroleum product is sent to intermingle with the world economy, it

4:49starts in a place like this harbor, where highway, railway, and river intersect and Travero’s

4:55Logistics Park Debeque sits. Here, goods, whether by belt and elevator or simple front loader are

5:01poured into a barge operator’s standardized, 195-foot by 35-foot barge, then lashed together

5:07with steel cables to another 14 barges and pushed out into the river by diesel powered tow boat.

5:12Compared to most commercial vessels, crews on these towboats are small—typically less than

5:17ten people, composed of a captain, a pilot, a cook, and some engineers and deck hands.

5:22Almost universally, they work 6-hour on, 6-hour off schedules, nonstop, for their entire time

5:28onboard—typically a 28-day stretch. In practice, a given deckhand might work from 5:30 to 11:30 am,

5:35then attempt to get some sleep before starting work again at 5:30 pm, before an abbreviated

5:40overnight rest starting at 11:30 pm. The only crew member that doesn’t follow this schedule is the

5:45cook, who will generally prepare meals to be ready for 45 or so minutes before and after the 5:30 am,

5:5111:30 am, and 5:30 pm transitions. Crew facilities are also basic. Outside

5:57of bedrooms, these boats might have a small gym, crew lounge, and galley,

6:01but that’s about it. After all, when working 12-hours a day, there’s really not much time

6:06left for anything but sleeping and eating. And there’s plenty that gets done in those

6:1112 hours-on. Just 16 miles or 25 kilometers down the river from Travero’s Logistics Park sits Lock

6:18and Dam no. 12. On the Upper Mississippi, there’s never more than a couple dozen miles to go before

6:23arriving to a lock and dam. Tows notify the lock master over radio when they’re about 30-minutes

6:28away, which gives the operator time to prepare the lock—filling it with water if a boat’s approaching

6:32from upstream, or draining if the opposite. Tow captains must approach each lock carefully,

6:38tightly lining up with the wall that marks its approach. After all, there is often a current,

6:42called an out-draft, pulling from the entrance of the lock towards the dam,

6:46since that’s where the water flows when the lock is closed. Getting sucked into this current can

6:50and sometimes does prove disastrous—it’ll trap a tow upstream of the dam and potentially destroy

6:56the structure—so captains will often have their own notes written down based

6:59on their experience through the years, reminding them of the particularities of each lock.

7:04But upon successful approach, a tug pushes its barges into the lock chamber—or at least, half

7:09of them. That’s because the Upper Mississippi has 600-foot locks, but the standard tow-size through

7:15this stretch is 15-barges in a three by five configuration, leading to an overall length of

7:20about a thousand feet. Therefore, deckhands have to spend about a half an hour splitting their tow

7:25in two before the lock master can even close the gates and start draining the chamber. That takes

7:30about another 20 minutes, then the first half of the tow gets floated out and tied up as the second

7:35half, including the tug itself, waits another 20 minutes for the chamber to fill up with water

7:40again. Next, after another 20-minute draining cycle, it takes about an hour for deckhands to put

7:45the tow back together, leading to a roughly three to four hour process of getting through each and

7:49every lock—and that’s if they’re lucky. The locks each operate on a first-come, first-served system,

7:55meaning if there’s another vessel going through, a tow has to wait up to 3-4 hours before it can

8:00go through the 3-4 hour process. In the peak fall grain export season, these delays can

8:06really compound and limit the throughput of the river just when it’s needed most.

8:10And it’s along this process, passing lock after lock, where it becomes impossible to ignore

8:15that the Mississippi, nor the Illinois for that matter, nor the Columbia, nor the upper Danube,

8:20nor the lower Nile are strictly rivers any more. It’s one thing for a river to be deemed navigable

8:25in its simplest definition: to be sailed by ships or boats, but it's another to live up

8:30to the haughty standards of what navigable is to, say the US Army Corps of Engineers,

8:34whose definition hinges not on the possibility of making it up or down a river but the continued,

8:40consistent, reliability of travel along the river for the purpose of commerce.

8:45Rivers, no matter the state, country, or continent, are just fickle. Changing shape

8:50and course by the season and the year, they’re difficult to govern physically and politically.

8:56Consider just the task of defining what the Mississippi river really is. At base,

9:01you could start with this map. But that wouldn’t consider some of its most important tributaries

9:06such as these. And still, this is oversimplified, as supplying a river that on average moves nearly

9:12500,000 cubic feet of water through it every single second, requires the tributaries of

9:17these tributaries, along with the unseen groundwater from across the river’s entire

9:22basin draining eventually into this cumulative flow. From this more holistic—albeit, far from

9:28exhaustive—view of the river, the Mississippi river’s an assemblage of gravity-fed water from

9:3241% of the lower 48’s landmass spread across 32 American states and two Canadian provinces. As

9:39an amalgamation of precipitation spread across thousands of miles, the river’s disposition is

9:44defined by its broader basin. Massive rain here, for instance, could lead to flooding along the

9:49river below, as it did in 1927 when a swollen Mississippi killed 500 and left hundreds of

9:55thousands displaced. Massive earthquakes here, could fundamentally reshape the river’s path,

10:00as they did in 1811 and 1812. And a low snow year here, and hot dry summer here could bring

10:06flows down to levels so low that it threatens grain shipping in the fall, as they did in 2012.

10:12On the inverse, what a river does provide that an interstate or rail line can’t is the efficiency

10:17boost of buoyancy, and what a river offers that a canal can’t, is the natural plumbing—which, while

10:22not perfectly streamlined nor always dependable, provides a far more advanced starting point.

10:28 To first turn a river into a navigable waterway capable of powering international commerce,

10:33there needs to be a legal framework as to who has purview over the river. In the US,

10:38beginning in the 1800s as the fledgling federal government scrambled to create effective efficient

10:42means of transportation to spur on economic activity, the responsibility of turning natural

10:47features into navigable ones fell on the US Army Corps of Engineers. On the Mississippi,

10:52their work began with this, the designation of the Mississippi River Commission and the exploratory

10:56mission to figure out how its flows could be harnessed for the purposes of interstate trade.

11:01First, the goal was to provide, from the upper river below, a consistent 4-foot or 1.3 meter

11:07deep channel. As time went on, the ask grew. Then it was a 4.5 foot-deep channel, then a consistent

11:146-foot deep channel, then finally, with the rivers and harbors act of 1930, a 9-foot or 3-meter deep

11:20channel. For the river’s upper reaches, this meant significant reconfiguration.

11:25Split at St. Louis, the Mississippi River has two rather distinct dispositions. From

11:30St. Paul to St. Louis, the river moves quicker, it’s smaller in stature, and it’s comparatively

11:35steep—dropping 400 feet or 120 meters over 670 miles or 1100 kilometers. Or it was. Now, just

11:44about wherever you zoom in on this upper section it looks pretty uniform, it’s wide, it’s smooth,

11:49and every couple dozen miles, it’s dammed. These dams and accompanying locks, all 27, aren’t for

11:55storage or flood control, but for transportation, representing a massive 1930s federal investment in

12:01turning a wild river into a consistent canal for the benefit of midwestern agricultural exporters

12:06upon which the whole region still relies. Some ninety years on, the corps of engineers still

12:11maintains and operates these locks, and in the intermediate decades, they’ve expanded to

12:16account for 192 navigational locks nationwide. The locks end at St. Louis, not long after the

12:22Mississippi has added the flow of the Illinois and just before it adds the Ohio. And it’s here where

12:27the river’s character flips. From Cairo, Illinois to Vicksburg, Mississippi the river has only

12:32600 miles to travel to the Gulf Coast. But with only 300 feet or 100 meters of elevation to drop

12:38across that entire stretch, the river restlessly meanders across its massive historical floodplain,

12:43creating a winding path to the ocean that stretches out to about 1,000 miles or 1,600

12:48kilometers. Through the lower Mississippi average flows are high enough to deem navigational locks

12:52and dams unnecessary, but with so much water and so many bends along a flat landscape come

12:58other challenges for the corps of engineers. If one is to drive along a county road along the

13:02lower Mississippi, there's a good chance they can’t see it, that it’s on the other side of

13:07a grassy mound. If one is to look at the lower Mississippi from above, there’s a good chance

13:11they’ll notice that these grassy mounds don’t meander like the river, but make unnatural,

13:16calculated, perfectly straight lines across the landscape. These are the over 2,000 miles

13:21of levee, built primarily by the Army Corps of Engineers, that millions count on to keep the

13:26flooding Mississippi out of their towns and homes when it does dump in the upper reaches in the

13:30basin, and that barge operators count on to keep the Mississippi in a single, dependable channel.

13:35Of course, levees, while noticeable to the trained eye, are easy to miss. The same can

13:40be said about the locks and dams, just relatively low-lying structures spread along what seems to be

13:45a reasonably slow and easy-to-contain section of river. Like the structures, the continued

13:50upkeep of the river is easy to overlook, too. Dredging, afterall, isn’t terribly visible

13:55to the outside observer, it’s moving sand and silt and sediment from a river bottom. And yet,

14:01continued dredging to keep the channel at 9 feet deep from 2014 to 2023 in the upper Mississippi

14:06cost on average $45 million a year. The same goes for revetment, the process of stabilizing river

14:13banks with concrete matting—it’s difficult to notice unless you put it in, and yet,

14:17the Armor 1, a vessel tasked with laying down the matting to hold the river in place for another

14:2150 years cost a reported $125 million. All that’s to say, while rightly paraded

14:29as a geographic super power, navigable waterways are hardly natural systems;

14:33they’re expensive-to-maintain hybrids with a heavy human touch. And in the case of most around the

14:39US, the critical human additions that make these safe and reliable for the frailest of barges and

14:44towboats are often overlooked and getting really old. Take locks—with most being built mid-century,

14:51or in the case of those along the Mississippi even earlier, nearly all have outlived their

14:55estimated 50-year expected lifespan. While still operational, they’re increasingly unreliable.

15:01As a 2023 Department of Transportation report noted, from 2010 to 2020, across 192 lock sites,

15:07while total lockages have declined, the percentage of vessels delayed has climbed from the 30s into

15:12the 50s. More problematic: the average delay tripled in duration from 2010 to 2019. And

15:19while shipping companies can mitigate problems when it comes to planned delays, in 2020, about a

15:24third of all lock delays were unscheduled. In the American Society of Civil Engineers’ most recent

15:29infrastructure report card, inland waterways received a D+ while noting that the Army Corps of

15:34Engineers reports both a $6.8 billion backlog on projects that have been approved but not financed,

15:40and $2.7 billion annually on funds not received to do annual required maintenance. Making things

15:46even more difficult, and inland rivers even less dependable is less consistent weather

15:50and increasingly common and increasingly extreme weather events. The Mississippi has had low water

15:55years in 2012, in 2013, in 2022, ‘23, and ‘24 for instance, while also massively flooding in 2019.

16:04Then there’s the fact that fundamentally, the locks along most American rivers are just too

16:09small to serve today’s purposes.   Much discussion is made over whether the Federal

16:13Government should upgrade the river to 1,200 foot locks—the size that could allow Upper Mississippi

16:17tows to make their way through in just one cycle, rather than two. This would increase

16:22throughput enormously—the three or more hour process of passing a lock would go by in just

16:2730 or so minutes, saving days of time across one Minneapolis to St Louis journey. Delays

16:32at the locks, waiting for other traffic to clear, would become a thing of the past and

16:36shipping rates might go down, allowing an ever-so-slightly expanded profit margin for

16:39farmers in Illinois and Iowa and beyond. And in fact, we’ll even get to see what

16:44this looks like in practice. Construction has started at lock 25, just north of St Louis,

16:49to build a brand-new 1,200-foot lock. Funding was secured as part of the Biden Administration’s

16:55Infrastructure Act, and construction is expected to be completed… sometime in the 2030s. Also,

17:01the total amount allocated for the project was $732 million. That’s to say, upgrading the entire

17:08Upper Mississippi’s locks would possibly be a project rivaling the annual budget of NASA.

17:14And it’s not like there’s a lot of revenue that can pay for these upgrades. The Mississippi is

17:18completely free to use—including its locks. They’ll open and close for any vessel,

17:23commercial or recreational, without charging a cent… at least directly. The Federal Government

17:28does charge a 29 cent per gallon tax on fuel used by commercial barges on designated inland

17:33waterways in most circumstances, which goes into a trust fund that is primarily used for construction

17:37projects on the waterways, rather than operations. So in 2020, for example, $131 million of the

17:43Army Corps of Engineering’s spending on inland waterways came from this fund, but this was out

17:47of a total annual cost of $1.3 billion. So that’s to say, the inland waterways effectively act as a

17:54massive subsidy from the American taxpayer to its users—particularly, to the agriculture industry.

18:00One could, and some do argue that this is unfair—for everyone to pay for a system

18:05that only benefits the few. This argument is bolstered by the fact that what these

18:09waterways are particularly good at is getting bulk quantities of grain and soybean and other

18:13agricultural products to New Orleans to be transferred onto an ocean-going ship for

18:17international export. That’s to say, in extreme cases, American taxpayers are paying to expand the

18:23profit margins of agribusinesses selling their soybean to China. This is true—unlike roads,

18:29there is no significant, direct utility for this transportation system for the general public.

18:33But right now, the Mississippi is in this state where it’s extraordinarily expensive to run,

18:38but it’s also underfunded. America does rely on it. While some of its utility is enjoyed by all

18:44the foreign countries that buy American crops, it simultaneously secures the domestic food supply;

18:49it transports raw materials that sit at the start of the supply chain for other industries; in fact,

18:54it’s estimated that each day the river closes due to lock failure, for example,

18:57costs the American economy $300 million. But despite that, it’s simultaneously

19:04underutilized. Far fewer barges traverse its stretch today than in decades past as freight

19:10traffic has moved onto the rails and roads. The rails and road systems are being stretched to

19:14their limits—freight railroads are suffering from capacity shortages and fast-deteriorating

19:19infrastructure due to their unwillingness to invest in capital improvements, while the trucking

19:23industry is suffering from a driver shortage as young people are unwilling to work in the

19:27increasingly aged industry. There has been plenty of discussion over developing a network of ports

19:31and vessels capable of transporting container cargo up and down the river so it can act as a

19:35direct competitor to freight rail and trucks, but so far little has translated into action.

19:41The issues of inefficiency and deterioration on the Mississippi are so well-recognized that barge

19:46operators themselves successfully advocated to be taxed more—they were the driving force behind

19:52the hike from 20 to 29 cents per gallon in 2014 because they so desperately wanted maintenance

19:57and upgrades. But it still wasn’t even close to enough. Right now, the Mississippi and America’s

20:03other inland waterways are funded and functional enough that they’re relied upon by whole

20:07industries and responsible for the economic ascent of entire regions, but not funded enough that

20:12they actually function even close to their full potential. That’s to say, they're great enough

20:16to have changed the entire course of American history, but they’re still just not great.

20:24One thing I noticed while researching this video is that quite a few academics have

20:28attempted to solve the issue of Mississippi River lock delays using data science—after all,

20:33even the busiest locks are used well below their theoretical capacity, but still experience delays

20:38due to a lack of traffic management. This is a great example of how knowledge in STEM subjects

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How Inland Waterways Work

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