Missouri River barges could be headed for extinction

KRT) - Capt. Pat Gerlach is celebrating his 48th birthday in the wheelhouse of the towboat Lauren D. He is thrilled with a gift that has come his way.

"The good Lord is looking out for me. He sent me a little water for my birthday," says Gerlach, pushing barges laden with fertilizer upriver to Kansas City.

In fact, it was the Army Corps of Engineers that dispatched the extra water into the Missouri River after a monthlong standoff with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over protecting the nests of endangered birds.

The episode was the latest example of threats to Missouri River navigation from the drive by government agencies and advocacy groups to restore the river's wildlife. But an even greater threat looms - proposals to lower the river's summer flow every year, which the barge industry contends could end navigation permanently.

In July, the corps dialed back the normal flow from Gavins Point Dam in South Dakota so as not to wash away nests of the federally protected least terns and piping plovers. The Fish and Wildlife Service refused to allow removal of the nests out of fear that newborn chicks would perish.

But the birds flew their nests, the water began to flow, and the first big boat to hazard a run on the Missouri in more than a month got under way on Aug. 22. That pleased Gerlach, who was dressed for the occasion in his finest St. Louis Cardinals T-shirt.

"Here we go again. They finally got those birds hatched out and we've got some water," Gerlach says eagerly into his VHF radio as he maneuvers near Cora Island, about five miles from the Missouri's mouth.

But even on his birthday, Gerlach can't relax: He must keep an eye on the depth finder of the Lauren D., a 135-foot-long vessel operated by Blaske Towing of Alton, Mo.

A week earlier, the Omaha, another Blaske towboat, had a problem while heading downriver on the Missouri near Augusta. The Omaha is a smaller vessel that can operate in shallower water, and Blaske was loading light. It shouldn't have bothered to load at all.

Smack in the middle of the channel at Mile 60, a rock punched a hole in the flotation tank of a barge, and it began to sink. After moving the rest of the barges in the tow to safety, the Omaha called in a crane to unload 8,000 bushels of soggy, ruined soybeans. It was a costly mess.

To Roger Blaske, co-owner of the company, the episode was yet another indignity in a summer marked by questions about his industry's future on the Missouri.

"Everything that goes wrong on the river, we get blamed for," he said, echoing the sentiment held widely in his industry.

If the Fish and Wildlife Service gets its way on the Missouri, barge operators have more to lose than any single industry.

Government biologists assert that low flows similar to what the industry just endured are necessary each summer to re-establish sandbars and slow-moving waters that let creatures reproduce as they once did.

For a decade, the Fish and Wildlife Service has tried to force the Army Corps of Engineers to commit to a regimen of seasonal flows from dams. The discussion is more than academic.

Federal agencies are forbidden by the Endangered Species Act to operate in a way that harms protected species. The Fish and Wildlife Service has told the corps that unless it changes dam operations, several species might become extinct.

Until the Bush administration decides what to do - or courts decide for it - barge operators will be plagued with uncertainty. And that's not good for business, which on the Missouri River has never lived up to expectations.

The roots of modern commercial navigation date back to 1910, when Congress approved a 6-foot-deep navigation channel from St. Louis to Kansas City. Construction proceeded until World War I.

In the 1920s, the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce led the fight to finish the job. After luring then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover to their cause, business leaders won authorization in Congress to complete the 6-foot channel to Sioux City, Iowa, and to study deepening the Kansas City-to-St. Louis segment to 9 feet.

The corps built dikes along the river in earnest, cutting away its wide bends, divorcing it from sloughs and backwaters and making islands disappear. In 1945, Congress gave the go-ahead for a 9-foot-deep channel running the entire 734 miles from St. Louis to Sioux City.

But nearly a century after work began, the 1.5 million tons of commercial cargo that barges carry today falls far short of the 12 million tons predicted by promoters when they were making the case for engineering the unruly Missouri into a navigable river. Tonnage has been declining since hitting 3.3 million tons in 1977.

The corps estimates the overall benefits to the nation of Missouri River navigation at $9 million - and the overall costs of supporting navigation at $5 million.

That 1.5 million tons of commercial cargo look downright puny alongside the 130 million tons on the upper Mississippi River. And when the proceeds are stacked up to the tens of millions of dollars in proceeds from recreation, the Missouri River barge industry is ridiculed by those who argue that a valuable public resource has been converted into a barge canal for little benefit.

"If taxpayers understood what was spent to take care of several barges a month, there would be an uproar," said Wayne Freeman, executive director of the Great Rivers Habitat Alliance in St. Louis. His organization works to preserve floodplain land along the Missouri, Mississippi and Illinois rivers.

Jim Milligan, who heads the Fish and Wildlife Service's fishery resource office in Columbia, Mo., is even more blunt.

"Navigation peaked on the Missouri River in the 1860s when the railroad started putting steamboats out of business," he said. "We need to find something better for these people to do."

It's no wonder that veteran towboat operators like Don Huffman feel like they're caught in one of the Missouri's swirling eddies.

Huffman, 63, has been running barges on the Missouri for more than 30 years. In March, he sold the towing company founded by his father to MEMCO Barge Line Inc., a bulk carrier.

He dismisses one solution that critics of his industry have begun to offer: buying out the barge industry along the Missouri. Such talk, he says, ignores the many benefits of barges that don't show up in the statistics: the savings to farmers who might otherwise be forced to ship by rail; the expanding short-haul business by companies mining sand and gravel from the river; and the jobs that would be lost not just on the barges but at terminals along the river.

What's more, statistics thrown around in Congress don't take into account the flood control downstream that goes hand-in-hand with keeping the river tightly in its banks, Huffman says.

"Look out the window at all the buildings. Look along Highway 40. Nobody is saying `let's take that land back 200 years.' I don't know why we would want to do it with the river. It's just not practical," he said.

Like Huffman, Paul Davis, who operates Interstate Marine Terminals Inc. in Boonville, Mo., is forging political connections to help him survive. His business was off even before barges stopped running this summer. It was June when the last vessel stopped at his port_which is near Boonville's new riverboat casino - delivering molasses from New Orleans for cattle feed.

"It's tough when you have a challenge to the very essence of your business," he said in Boonville. "I'm well aware that the hidden agenda here is to drive navigation off the river."

The agenda isn't hidden very well. North Dakota, South Dakota, their powerful senators, the Fish and Wildlife Service, recreation advocates and conservationists up and down the river make no secret of wanting to sacrifice big-boat navigation on the Missouri to make a meaningful start at river restoration.

If it weren't for their own allies in Congress and in Missouri, the barge operators might already be looking for other rivers or other work. But extremely low flows downstream also have the potential to jeopardize power plants and even drinking water supplies, more reasons why the state of Missouri and its congressional delegation are fighting against change.

As Huffman put it, "What we've got here is like an old- fashioned Western water fight: They want the water up there and we want it down here. And if you live in Missouri, you want to protect what we have."

It was written long ago that the trouble with taking a boat ride up the Missouri is that you have to take the boat along.

Before it was channelized, shortened and harnessed into armored banks, the river's tree snags and sudden depth fluctuations were the primary culprits in sinking an estimated 450 steamboats.

These days, low water is the primary threat to navigation. That's why, as he motors the Lauren D. upstream, Gerlach wishes the corps had released even more water from Gavins Point Dam.

Four or five times the towboat bumps bottom en route to Kansas City, once so forcefully that it frays a cable that tethers the barges to the boat. But unlike the Omaha's experience, no mini-disaster occurs.

An outdoor enthusiast himself, Gerlach admittedly is torn by all the talk about restoring the Missouri and its wildlife. He's the type who goes squirrel hunting but puts down his gun to watch the squirrels cavort.

"I love this river," he says, his eyes riveted on the depth finder, reading 17 feet at present. "But I'd hate to see it shut down."

From a Kansas perspective this is a problem as well. Earlier this summer, during a drought, the Corps drew down all of the reservoirs along the Kansas River several feet each. This was done to raise the Missouri river about ONE INCH to aid barge navigation. Is that a positive return on one's investment? I have been suddenly strapped with work, so if some posted this in the meanwhile I apologize.

This is ridiculous. Every drought year we go through the same thing. Coal, oil, grain, etc., all has to go to where the people are. Other than trains the only other option is over the road trucks, which, of course, is the most expensive option.

All over a bunch of birds.

The Corps of Engineers could've had transportation, bird and fish if they'd done the job right.

A friend of mine built a boat and sailed it down the Mississippi from Minnesota to the Gulf. He had envisioned seeing sprawling plantations with land running up to the river's edge. He was dissapointed to find the he saw only rock covered levees over 90% of the route. Same on the Kansas and Missouri Rivers with few exceptions.

The really stupid thing is, after the Corps straightened out the river, (and made it flow faster) floods became more pronounced. Property owners building in the former flood plains get wiped out but rebuild with government-backed flood insurance.

The really stupid thing is, after the Corps straightened out the river

Now they drain our reservoirs 10-12 feet at will to raise the river an inch. When you start playing with Mother Nature at that level you have to play catch up all day every day.

Which was there first, the river or the dam? Now who built the dams? What effect did the dams have on natural river levels? Since when did recreation replace commerce as the most important economic benefit?
The whole Missouri River basin in Missouri is become one HUGE mosquito farm so the corp of Environgineers can breed west nile virus and malaria when it comes back.

With the exceptions of the hwy 40 corridor in st louis where the corps built the levies higher. I believe barge traffic would be substantially higher if the water levels were higher. Barge traffic was decreased by edicts of control, not because the barges were not profitable as was stated.

I've read the Missouri never was deep enough, even after channelization, to have the same competitive advantage that the Mississippi does over rail freight. I recall shipping coal in barges, to the tune of 1680 tons per barge, from the Big Sandy all the way to St. Paul for $3.85/ton. The trip to Omaha was twice that figure and most barge companies refused to bother. Any way you cut it, the Corps screwed up the Missouri so that it'll take till the next glacier to fix it.

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