If everything goes according to plan this week, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will navigate its way through one of the typical challenges of navigation season on the Missouri River without running ag
ART HOVEY / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Tuesday, July 22, 2008 7:00 pm
Mike Olson thinks businesses in Nebraska and surrounding states are missing the boat.
As other companies bear the brunt of high fuel costs and moving freight by land, Olson is awaiting the arrival of Missouri River barges at Blair to transport alfalfa pellets to Gunterville, Ala.
Going with the flow past Nebraska City, Brownville and on into the Mississippi River is not a fuel guzzler kind of deal.
“It’s the only way our company is hooked up to the rest of the world,” Olson said from Consolidated Blenders headquarters in Hastings. “We can ship rail, but we’re not really suited, because we have to ship from four different locations.”
As he extols the virtues of consolidating and moving bulky products from pellet plants at Cozad, Lyons, Elm Creek and Odessa by water, the overall volume of commercial shipping on the Missouri is 30 years past its peak. A barge has not been as far north as Sioux City since 2004.
Could that pattern be reversed as the cost of land transportation takes a bigger bite out of bottom lines?
“Absolutely,” Olson said. “We are missing the boat.”
Restoring the Missouri to its 1970s and ’80s prominence as a water highway is not everybody’s idea of progress.
In fact, if it were up to South Dakota’s Missouri River coordinator, he would pull the plug on the requirement for annual releases of reservoir water to support a navigation season.
“I would,” John Cooper said. “And the reason I would is that, during the time I’ve worked on this river, I’ve seen a tremendous amount of water released for navigation. And it’s at the expense of a lot of other beneficial uses of water in the system.”
Almost a decade after a major drought descended on the northern river basin, Paul Johnston of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers office in Omaha reports that major reservoirs are finally regaining some of what they lost.
Oahe in South Dakota, Sacajawea in North Dakota and Fort Peck in Montana are up from 9 to 15 feet since the first of April, Johnston said. “Several of them were in the area of 30 or more feet down, so we’re talking about recovering almost half of that loss.”
But any thoughts of placing a higher federal priority on navigation must fit into a federal formula that calls for the corps to manage the river for flood control, hydropower potential and six other authorized purposes.
One key component of the strategy in Nebraska is environmental impact, including the river’s effect on threatened and endangered species, such as the interior least tern and the piping plover.
Even with gains in water storage, the corps still plans to end the navigation season Oct. 31, a month ahead of normal, and is restricting barges to floating no more than 7.5 feet down in the water, a foot less than normal.
For the third year, the corps is sending surges of water southward to lift barges on an as-needed basis. Last Friday, to accommodate the barges coming upriver, releases were increased from 14,000 cubic feet per second to 19,000 cfs.
More water is exciting stuff to Bill Beacom — a former towboat captain, now 67 and retired in Sioux City — and especially when you mix it in with a big spike in energy prices and the braking effect the barge option can have on rail rates.
“There’s an even more convincing argument right now,” said Beacon, “and that argument was not viable 30 years ago. And that is that we’re having more problems with our infrastructure.
“Our railroads are full,” he said. “They don’t even want to talk to anybody who doesn’t want to ship 125-car trainloads.”
At the same time, roads are deteriorating and congested with truck traffic. Bigger barges can haul as much as 30 rail cars full of grain.
Perhaps the most obvious prospect for filling barges headed downstream from Nebraska is corn and soybeans.
But Darin Hanson of DeBruce Grain in Nebraska City said that elevator operation hasn’t shipped by barge in a long time.
“It’s been five years since we’ve done it,” Hanson said. “One of the biggest things is the river is so low that we can’t get enough product on board to get a full draft. So, economically, it doesn’t work.”
Besides that, he said, there’s only one company in the barge business on the Missouri.
He doesn’t foresee higher energy prices changing the freight equation?
“Now, if I was an elevator on the Illinois River or the Mississippi River, where barge freight is more competitive — but just to come up the Missouri River is not competitive.”
Tucker Boss, based at the Brownville branch of the Farmers Cooperative in Waverly, sees some possibilities. It could mean moving more grain with less fuel, Boss said.
It costs $150 in fuel now just to get a truck to Lincoln and back.
Environmentalists, such as Jason Skold of Omaha and the Nature Conservancy, measure management success on the Missouri largely by environmental impact.
Skold is familiar with a standard called “incidental take,” in which the corps and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have developed a formula for an acceptable loss of least terns and piping plovers to higher water releases.
Last year, according to corps calculations, the loss in eggs and chicks added up to 11 terns and 21 plovers in Nebraska. The “incidental take” allows for up to 294 plovers per year and 180 terns over a three-year period.
“Given a tough juggling act,” Skold said of the corps, “I’d say they’re handling it fairly well. It’s a very difficult situation, when they have threatened and endangered species nesting on sandbars and they know they have to bring water to support another of their authorized purposes — navigation.”
South Dakota river official Cooper acknowledged energy costs need to be factored into river policy. He said Congress should address that by looking at priorities established in 1944.
Water will always be a limiting factor. “I don’t care if we had a thousand barges on the river,” Cooper said. “If we didn’t have the water to support them, what are we going to do?”
Former towboat captain Beacom said Cooper is intent on keeping more water in reservoirs for recreation. Beacom sees a much more promising situation for river shipping.
“There’s not one thing we need to do to move barges on the Missouri River,” he said, “except to do it.”
Reach Art Hovey at 473-7223 or ahovey@journalstar.com.