Posted on 03/26/2014 7:40:20 AM PDT by thackney
...Port authorities nationwide pay into a fund designed to cover maintenance costs. The Port of Houston pays about $100 million annually into the fund, but gets back only about $25 million — about half of the $50 million needed to maintain one of the world’s busiest channels, said Roger Guenther, the Port of Houston’s executive director.
The port typically handles about 70 ships daily, plus 300 to 400 tugboats and barges. And Gulf of Mexico traffic — especially of large ships — is expected to increase with the opening next year of the Panama Canal expansion. Ports will need to have 50-foot deep channels, no air draft restrictions and state-of-the-art infrastructure to meet the needs of the biggest ships, Army Corps spokeswoman Sandra Arnold explained in an email.
Already, larger ships are moving through the area. Vessels from East Asia that didn’t arrive in Houston just 10 years ago now make up 25 percent of the port’s business, Guenther said. Many of these ocean-going vessels need at least 45-foot depths. The Corps has deepened some areas of the channel to accommodate the larger vessels, and the port is investing more than $700 million of its own money to remain competitive and allow ships to sail safely, Guenther said....
...In 1900, Houston was a sleepy inland town, while Galveston had a hugely lucrative port.... creating what is now the 52-mile long Houston Ship Channel, where more than 150 private industrial companies operate alongside the Port of Houston in the nation’s largest petrochemical complex.
The port is ranked first in the country for foreign waterborne tonnage, first in U.S. imports and first in export tonnage. Each year, more than 200 million tons of cargo is transported on some 8,000 vessels and 200,000 barge calls....
(Excerpt) Read more at fuelfix.com ...
They WILL have every environmentalist breathing down their communal necks, so not to worry.
Where’s that San Jacinto monument that’s taller than the Washington monument in D.C.? We took a ferry across some bay in our R.V. in 2009 and could see that huge and tall TX sized monument that look identical the the smaller one in D.C. So then we had to drive to it and walk through it. Very impressive!!!
Where the channel meets the bay.
http://www.sanjacinto-museum.org/Monument/
I really like the look of the stone they used.
We had a nice stay in Baytown before tearing off to Cape Canaveral to see one of the last shuttles take off in person before the Obama maladministration killed our manned space program. Shazzam!!!
Thanks for the links!!! Beautiful!!!
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