WITH THE PANAMA CANAL EXPANSION SCHEDULED FOR
completion in 2016, a lot of thought is being given to possible shifts
in patterns for shipping containers in and out of the country. Once
giant containerships begin sailing through the canal, East Coast port
volumes are expected to rise, and ports are deepening and expanding
their channels and installing large cranes necessary for unloading the
bigger vessels. At this point, I don’t think anyone really knows how
much volume will be diverted from the congested, labor-uncertain
West Coast ports, but it should be significant. A recent study by C.H.
Robinson and the Boston Consulting Group suggests that up to 10
percent of container traffic to the U.S. from East
Asia could shift from West Coast ports to East Coast
ports by 2020.
In the Midsouth and Midwest, observers are particularly interested in what will happen at the Port
of New Orleans. With a depth of 200 feet, this port
is located on the deepest section of the Mississippi
River and will have no draft issues. Port officials
predict that container traffic will increase by about
7 percent initially. The question is, where do the
containers go from there? The channel between
New Orleans and Baton Rouge, La., is about 45 feet
with a 50-foot depth at Baton Rouge. The U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers, which is responsible for maintaining the country’s
waterways, is considering dredging five feet from the lower Mississippi
in order to accommodate large ships as far up as Baton Rouge. The
projected cost is $300 million, but port experts believe the project
could generate another 24 million tons of cargo for Louisiana ports
over an eight-year period.
Even so, Baton Rouge is located a long way from other major cities
on the river, and the Corps of Engineers is responsible for maintaining
only a nine-foot depth between Baton Rouge and Minneapolis. While
cities like Vicksburg, Miss.; Memphis, Tenn.; and St. Louis, Mo.; have
deeper harbors, the only way for a container to traverse the length of
the river is to be transferred to a barge.
That’s just the first of many hurdles the container may face on
its journey inland. Once the tows get beyond St. Louis and start to
move into the upper Mississippi or other rivers, they face a variety
of infrastructure-related challenges. For starters, there’s the matter of
creaky river locks. The U.S. has 12,000 miles of navigable waterways,
almost all of which are part of the Mississippi River system. On these
12,000 miles, there are 242 locks, most of which are 60 to 70 years
BY CLIFFORD F. LYNCH fastlane
New canal meets Old Man River
old and showing their age. Their mechanized
gates malfunction, and the locks themselves
are in a serious state of disrepair. According
to Bloomberg Businessweek, in 2011, a 280-foot
section of concrete lock wall crumbled into the
Illinois River. The publication also noted that
many of these locks are “too small to accommodate the towboat and its typical 15-barge
load,” forcing the tow to break up the string
of barges and make multiple trips. On top of
that, there are 170 bridges
across the Mississippi, some
of which are so low that towboats must be equipped with
telescoping pilothouses to
pass beneath them.
As is the case with the rest
of the country’s infrastructure, the U.S. waterways desperately need funding. The
Without this added funding, repairs cannot be
completed until 2090.
Fortunately, there is a simple and efficient,
though more expensive, way to move the containers up the river—by railroad; and in my
opinion, containers on barges will not become
a major mode of transport. Among other problems, it would be slow and require a significant
facility expenditure at each of the destination
cities. However, it is unfortunate that shippers
along this powerful river do not at least have a
reliable lower-cost option.
Clifford F. Lynch is principal of C.F. Lynch & Associates, a provider
of logistics management advisory services, and author of Logistics
Outsourcing – A Management Guide and co-author of The Role of
Transportation in the Supply Chain. He can be reached at cliff@
cflynch.com.
