Editorial: ‘Paralysis By Analysis’ On Upper Miss

Waiting…waiting…waiting: as many have called it, “paralysis by analysis.” That is the best description of the ongoing scenario around the Upper Mississippi and Illinois rivers project. Now, to make matters worse, a directive from John Paul Woodley, the assistant secretary of the Army (civil works), requires the Corps to continue forecasting long-term grain demand with a new spatial equilibrium grain flow forecasting model.

Midwest Area River Coalition 2000 president Paul C. Rohde is among the latest to utilize the “paralysis” description. He says new modeling for grain demand will cost more than $807,000 from this year’s already compromised pre-construction, engineering and design (PED) budget. PED for the proposed navigation and ecosystem plan have been going on for 18 months. As MARC 2000 reports, “The project, initially estimated at $60 million under a three-year time frame, first moved forward in December 2004 after appropriations granted the Navigation-Ecosystem Sustainability Program (NESP) $13.5 million for fiscal 2005. [The] $10 million for fiscal 2006 significantly lagged behind the Corps’ estimated capability, at the time totaling $24 million for the fiscal year.”

The problem we face with the Upper Miss/Illinois river project is the same one we have faced with water projects across the board for years. We ignore the big picture and find ourselves struggling with evasive details we can do nothing about. We get lost in financial fog and forecasting mechanisms to the degree that we cannot function.

What should be uppermost in our thinking is that transportation demand is estimated to increase 50 percent or more in the next 15 years. We should not overlook the fact that water transportation moves about 15 percent of our cargo for well under 5 percent of the transportation cost. (Overall, water transport contributes to the national exchequer upwards of $15 billion annually as a result of customs fees. A sluggish Mississippi River system impacts this income.)

The question should be: How do we meet this 50 percent rise in transport demand? We certainly cannot meet it by stalling around for another decade or two, trying to forecast what grain demand will be that far into the future. Most sizable navigation projects take a decade or more to build. So we are already late.

We need to drop our pessimism and make stone soup—to advance the project by doing an environmental phase here, a maintenance project there, and begin construction of much-needed larger locks to eliminate traffic delays. No, it won’t happen overnight. But little by little it will get done, and our stone soup will be satisfying.

Also uppermost in our thinking should be that foreign countries are striving to take from us the overseas agricultural markets we have served for so long. By ignoring maintenance and modernization of the Mississippi River and Tributaries system we are giving carte blanche to our competitors. Backroom jokes among European transportation officials surely must focus on how silly we are. A worldly view tells us that countries able to do it are improving their waterways while we snooze.

The only thing left to say about grain forecasts is that they are evasive and it is silly to hold up the project in order to develop a model that might be folly as the last one was. The world demand for food surely should grab our attention. Corn is now being used to produce ethanol and reduce our dependency on foreign oil. That should grab our attention. The fact that vital cargoes other than agricultural products also face delays on our eroding waterway system is not to be overlooked.

Communications technology has improved so much that we can see people being attacked on streets in the Middle East virtually in real time; yet we plod along, trying to do the virtually impossible task of calculating grain demand during the next half-century and how it will be moved. The Corps also has access to this wonderful new technology, but the agency cannot predict what lawmakers will do. The agency cannot predict drought and flood. The Corps cannot read the mind of Congress. Every election threatens further disruption.

If a farmer evaluates his operation and discovers he would be better off financially by buying trucks and hauling his own grain, it doesn’t take him a decade to do it. If he doesn’t act on what he knows to be true, he will continue to see his operation erode—just as we are seeing our water transportation infrastructure erode.

We could surmise that a major stumbling block is in demanding grain transportation-forecast perfection when it cannot be attained. The real reason for our problem is that there are too many opponents of the Upper Miss/Illinois river project and they have far too much input into how things are being done.

We don’t think there is an “IF” in the business of transportation demand. It is growing by leaps and bounds. Railroads have no place to expand and can only add trains. Truck lines can only add trucks and further clog our congested highways.

The fact still remains that a single barge can carry the same amount of cargo moved in 15 jumbo hopper rail cars and 58 large semis. A standard 15-barge tow still carries the equivalent of two and a quarter 100-car unit trains or 870 large semis.

The fact still remains that while that 15-barge tow moves down the river more safely and far more environmentally friendly than truck or rail, the movement of 870 semis could produce a line of trucks bumper to bumper 11.5 miles long. Not only would other vehicular traffic be further endangered but the trucks would gobble up natural resources at a horrendous rate.

If we don’t quit horsing around and get to proper maintenance and modernizing of our river system, we will have no one to blame but ourselves when the axe falls. As sure as night follows day, reckoning will come.

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