Editorial: Post-Dispatch Helps Tell Water Transport Story

When the river drops to the extent that what is normally hidden below the surface begins to show and negative economic impacts come into play, the public begins to take notice. For example: the business section of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch featured adverse river conditions just before Labor Day. A five-column-wide picture showed a tow coming downriver, and the message overlay read, “Dropping River, Dropping Profits. Farmers, Barge Traffic Suffers When Old Man River Can’t Hold Its Water.”

Since we occasionally bash the Post-Dispatch for not being more attuned to the river and water transportation, we must applaud this effort to bring conditions to the public’s attention. The writers did a good job by pointing out statistics that appear infrequently in the press—statistics that help point out how river transportation is a great contributor to the economic well being of the nation.

We used to say that water transportation carries about 15 percent of the country’s domestic cargo, but of late we learned that if pipelines are eliminated from the equation, the figure rises considerably. The precise percentage is academic. What is important is that water transportation is a generous portion of the transportation mix, and it is cheaper and more environmentally friendly than trucks or railroads. What is important is that highways are congested and getting more so, and railroads have nowhere to expand.

Presently Congress is in a tug of war as it considers passage of a Water Resources Development Act (WRDA). In other words, during a conference between the House and the Senate, it will be decided how much money will be made available and, more importantly, how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will operate. Will it run its own show, so to speak, or will a committee be appointed to run the entire operation and just leave the Corps with the heavy work. Legislating Corps oversight may under some conditions seem appropriate, but in this case it will merely muddy up the works. The Corps does what Congress mandates. So final control does belong to Congress.

Part of WRDA is the issue of modernizing the Upper Mississippi and Illinois rivers by constructing 1,200-foot locks in appropriate places on each river and doing some environmental improvement.

What seems difficult for many to accept is that inappropriately small locks in the sequence of river installations cause ongoing delays in traffic and reduce barge-industry and farm profits just as low water does. The reason is that delays erode delivery schedules, which in turn increase costs and impact the bottom line—transportation and farm profits. This interruption also impacts grain terminals and users of grain products all along the river.

While it may not seem so at present, low-water conditions will come to an end eventually. One day we will be commiserating over high water. That’s nature’s way. The barges now being loaded to a lesser draft will carry bigger loads and profits will improve again. But that won’t fix the locks.

There is no benefit to be had by stalling the modernization of river facilities. As long as smaller locks interrupt the flow of river traffic, transporters and farmers and everyone else in between will suffer. And what about all those other products that normally move on the river? They suffer, too.

There is nothing we can do to end drought. He who finds a solution to that problem will get rich quickly. But we can and should see to it that our river highways are maintained appropriately. This year it is obvious to much of the public that billions of dollars are being spent to fix bad roadways and also to build new. The reason is that our nation continues to grow and so does vehicular traffic. Without proper maintenance, roadways will only become more congested and emissions will increase.

Actually the deteriorating state of our waterways and the growing backlog of delayed construction has had a negative impact on how much traffic moves by water. As always, nature does its part to throw a wrench into the works, and we cannot change that. But water experts around the world agree that the U.S. underutilizes its waterways at a time when using them more would help the nation environmentally. Also, water transport is cheaper. How we use our waterways impacts our trade balance and has a positive impact on how we fare against foreign competitors who struggle to take away our customers.

So we thank the Post-Dispatch for bringing to the attention of its readers the importance of the river. Maybe one day the public will see that a few billion to fix important waterways to facilitate water transport is just as important as spending $8 billion-plus to improve a swamp in Florida.

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