Weekly News Summary For July 13-19, 2009:
A maritime industry representative charged that information given by the engineering firm working to design an interstate highway loop around congested Baton Rouge, La., gave “false information to the media” about the proposed northerly bridge across the Mississippi River.
Mike Bruce of ABMB Engineers told an advisory council last week that “environmental and maritime concerns” would not allow the northern of the two proposed Mississippi River crossings to be located several miles above the existing bridge and Wilkinson Point, the treacherous bend in the river just above the Highway 190 Bridge.
“Our plan is for the bridge to be adjacent to the existing bridge,” Bruce was quoted in the (Baton Rouge) Morning Advocate in an article by Greg Garland.
But industry representatives disagree, suggesting that a bridge above Wilkinson Point would probably be much safer than one adjacent to the existing Hwy. 190 Bridge.
In response to the article, Z. Dave Deloach, of Port Allen, La.-based Deloach Marine Service, wrote Garland that, “(T)he decision has been made to give out false information to the media and let you do their selling job, rather than to work with maritime interests and show us they can build something that will not further complicate a safety issue.”…
The National Waterways Conference warned in its July newsletter that “efforts are underway within the Obama administration…to dramatically change the way this nation uses the land on the floodplains.”
The agent of this change is a White House office called the Council on Environmental Quality, a division of the White House executive staff. It was established in 1969 by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The Obama administration has revived it as the lead coordinator of energy and environmental policy across all federal agencies. The CEQ says it is simply extending the Principles and Guidelines of 2007’s Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) over more federal agencies. But the NWC is concerned that its activities might amount to a White House preemption of the Army Corps of Engineers.
The CEQ is proceeding with two separate but closely related efforts, either of which could have broad effects on federal water and floodplain policy.
In one of the initiatives, the CEQ is considering revising an executive order issued by President Jimmy Carter in 1977. Carter’s order EO11988 directed federal agencies to assess any of their activities that were sited in, or affected, flood plains. The CEQ is now considering amending this executive order. CEQ officials stressed to The Waterways Journal, though, that it is not a foregone conclusion that any amendment will happen….
One month after three of its creditors petitioned a bankruptcy court to place Bender Shipbuilding in Chapter 7 bankruptcy, the Mobile-based shipbuilder filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on July 2, the Alabama Press-Register reported.
President and chief executive Tom Bender said the move would help keep the firm open and would prevent more layoffs. “We’re continuing the business. We’ll have to shrink it a little,” he told the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for Alabama’s Southern District. He said the company plans to cut its workforce to about 300, down from a recent high of 400.
Bankruptcy judge Margaret Mahoney gave permission for the firm to pay $725,000 in wages due July 1 to salaried employees, plus $22,000 in worker compensation payments….
In 2005, Darby Washburn bought the old Stevens Shipyard property in Morgan City, La. He wasn’t quite sure what he was going to do with it, he said, other than that he wanted to start his own business.
The property required an extensive cleanup that took about six months. Washburn sold a “handful” of barges left on the property, and cut up an old drydock with floating tanks. He sold an old machine shop on the property, and got rid of the old drydock and marine ways. “We gutted the yard and put in all new equipment,” he told The Waterways Journal.
The proceeds from these sales kept Washburn going for awhile. “We caught the scrap market at a high,” he notes.
It wasn’t until 2007, Washburn said, that he made the decision to start a repair yard on the property. In April or May 2007, he bought a 150-ton-capacity Travelift that came from a Navy shipyard in San Diego, and was refurbished in Wisconsin.
A snowy winter and a wet spring have refilled all but one of the upper Missouri River reservoirs, and as a result, the commercial navigation season on the lower portion of the river will not be shortened this year, the Corps of Engineers reported last week.
Under the Corps’ operating plan for the river, the water elevations in the six large reservoirs are surveyed July 1 of each year. Based on that information, the Corps decides how long the navigation season will be, and how much water will be released into the lower river for barges. For nearly a decade, the Corps has announced both shorter seasons and reduced flows, meaning that barges often couldn’t load to full drafts.
This year, though, the Corps found that total reservoir storage was 56.8 million acre-feet (maf.), enough water to meet the needs of both upstream and downstream interests….
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