The Real Western Rivers
By an inherited quirk of accepted usage, the Mississippi River and its tributary system are still sometimes referred to as “the Western Rivers,” harkening back to a time when the Mississippi River Basin was “the West” and America’s frontier.
But the Columbia-Snake River System makes up the real “western rivers,” with the second most significant river navigation activity outside the unrivaled Mississippi River and its tributaries. The Columbia-Snake River System is the nation’s largest wheat export gateway, transporting more than 56 percent of all U.S. wheat to international markets, mostly by barge. More than 10 million tons of wheat, including more than two-thirds of U.S. soft white wheat, are transported annually via this system.
The Columbia and Snake rivers make up a different operating environment from the Mississippi, Ohio, Gulf Intracoastal Waterway and other inland waterways, as this week’s feature on MobileOps software points out. Cargo mixes, tow configurations, infrastructure profiles and water conditions are all different on the Columbia and Snake rivers.
Those operating conditions result in different barge designs. Barges on the Columbia-Snake system are smaller, highly specialized for grain and container transport, and limited to a four- or five-barge maximum tow size by locks on the system that measure 86 feet by 675 feet.
Unlike the massive 30- to 40-barge tows on the Lower Mississippi, the Columbia-Snake system relies on faster, smaller towboats navigating a slack-water lock system to reach ports as far as 465 miles inland.
The benefits of commercial navigation on this system have been severely contested. The four lower Snake River dams—Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose and Lower Granite—face pressure to be dismantled due to their alleged impact on salmon populations. Legal battles have seesawed back and forth in the courts and politically as succeeding federal administrations take divergent stances on the issue. At the end of the Biden administration, it appeared a deal was done to take down the dams within a decade — until the Trump administration revoked it in June of last year.
The plaintiffs in that case went back to court, and on March 4, a federal judge issued orders regarding “spill levels” at dams on the system. The interests of farmers, who use irrigation water, customers of hydropower and — not least — barge operators who depend on navigation in the system will continue to be weighed in court against the salmon.
Apart from the salmon issue, the regulatory environment on the West Coast is especially challenging for maritime interests. This means that constant educational efforts are necessary, not just to secure gains, but to fend off threats to this national asset.
