Editorial: Case Against Waterway Support Propped By Pseudo ‘Facts’

Critics of water resource development and water transportation have propped up their arguments with the contention that water transportation is declining. The implication is that the towing industry should vacate some rivers.

The Ohio River Navigation Investment Model ORNIM), developed by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in collaboration with the Navigation Planning Center at the Corps of Engineers’ Huntington District, supports the view that critics have been wrong and that they have relied on pseudo ‘facts.”

As for the Ohio River, findings reveal that navigational benefits may have been under-estimated. According to Capitol Currents, newsletter of the Waterways Council, Inc., T. Randall Curlee, a navigation economist at Oak Ridge, described the new model at a recent Maritime Summit in Huntington, W.Va. He explained that ORNIM allows use of additional and more refined “real world” data, in combination with state-of-the-art computer programs to move “to a new frontier of navigation modeling.”

Past models, Curlee explained, erroneously assumed that river traffic would be diverted to other modes as lock congestion forced costly delays. But they never considered the congestion on overland modes. Now we find that many shippers prefer to stay on the river, despite higher costs.

Previous models also under-estimated how important it is for a river system to be reliable and even ignored container movements.

Cargo value is another consideration. Don Waldon, administrator of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, has long argued that cargo quality (not just tonnage) should be considered. Coal is less valuable than rocket boosters.

Since the Missouri has no locks, lock delays have no application. But the accuracy of estimated navigation benefits has long been a bone of contention. Industry leaders believe they have been under-estimated. Naturally, critics believe the opposite. Findings from the new model show us that we must be more diligent about nailing down benefits.

Many finds of the new model could apply to the Upper Mississippi. Have navigation benefits been grossly under-estimated there as well? It seems to us, the greater the population density, the greater the benefits of navigation.

Pseudo “facts” could certainly have influenced decisions made by congressional delegates. It could be that as a result of those influences, “Over the past 10 years, the navigation and operations and maintenance (O&M) budget [of the Corps] has been flat when measured in constant dollars…the negative ramifications have increased dramatically” (Waterways Council). The Ohio River system is more than $55 million behind in maintenance alone, says Robert M. Willis, operations chief for the Corps’ Great Lakes and Ohio River Division.

Back to benefits: David A. Weekly, of the Navigation Planning Center in Huntington, says that as the center’s work relates to the Upper Mississippi/Illinois Waterway Study, it is working on more realistic waterway value assessments. It is looking at new performance measures that would include waterway-related jobs, earnings, taxes generated, and social benefits such as reduced highway congestion, accidents and air emissions, and tourism and recreation benefits (Capitol Currents).

As water transport leaders have long suggested, we must take a more realistic approach to navigation benefit/cost ratio evaluations. ORNIM findings suggest that we are heading in that direction.

It is understandable, but not comforting to know, that pseudo “facts” delivered up regularly by waterway critics have been instrumental in the deterioration of our waterways infrastructure. It is not “pseudo”, however, when we report that in March the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the waterways infrastructure a “D-“ rating, down from “D+” in 2001.

That rating is not difficult to fathom when we consider that of the 257 locks on the more than 12,000 miles of inland waterways operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, nearly 50 percent are functionally obsolete. By 2020, that number will increase to 80 percent. The cost to replace the present system of locks is more than $125 billion.

The buggy whip disappeared from the scene because the buggy was replaced by better modes. There are no replacement modes for many of the cargoes moved by water. Also, container-on-barge movements are opening up entirely new vistas for inland waterways.

A wide-scale, honest effort to evaluate navigation benefits correctly should increase congressional support for increased civil works expenditures.

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