Mighty Mississippi: River remains vital to health of national economy

By Dan Nienaber
CNHI News Service

April 15, 2007 01:01 am

— From his excursion-boat dock off a cobblestone landing built by black slaves in Memphis 200 years ago, Capt. William Lozier peers out at the imposing Hernando De Soto Bridge and reflects on the significance of the Mississippi River.
“The more traffic you see coming under that bridge,” he asserts, “the lower gas prices go. It shows how important this river is, and always has been, for shipping.”
Lozier, 32, a third-generation owner of Memphis Riverboats Inc., referred specifically to the 195-foot, double-hull tanker barges carrying petroleum from the Gulf Coast to refineries up the river.
But economic dependence on the Mississippi extends to far more than gas and oil. It also serves as the nation’s primary transportation channel for fertilizer, industrial chemicals, lumber, pulp and paper, sand and gravel, steel and coal.
For Midwest grain farmers, it is a lifeline to the world. Corn, soybeans and wheat are shipped slowly down the river to ports in south Louisiana, then exported to foreign lands.
Pushed by 10,000-horsepower towboats, flotillas of barges ply the watery highway at 4 to 8 miles per hour, delivering more than 400 million tons of bulk cargo annually, federal statistics show.
Known as America’s main artery of commerce, the mighty Mississippi meanders 2,350 miles – starting as a trickle of headwater in the north woods of Minnesota and growing to a mile-wide mouth at the Gulf of Mexico.
That makes it the longest river in North America, and the third largest watershed in the world, behind the Congo and the Amazon.
As the crow flies, the distance from Minnesota to Louisiana is less than 700 miles. But Mark Twain, in his 1883 book, Life on the Mississippi, described it as the “crookedest river in the world” because it zigzags through 10 states. Floods, dams, locks, levees and jetties have altered its natural course over the years.
The National Waterways Conference, the federal agency that tracks inland river traffic, estimates 400,000 people rely on the Mississippi’s transportation system for their livelihood.
Lanny Chalk, manager of the barge company Fullen Dock and Warehouse of Memphis, is one of them. He said the river has long played a major role in domestic and international trade, dating to the days of early American explorers.
“There are a lot of people out there who have no idea what the Mississippi River contributes to the world,” he said.
Hokan Miller, a dispatcher with the barge company Upper River Services of St. Paul, Minn., said countless tons of grain are shipped down the river for overseas destinations. He said it is mostly used to feed livestock in places where there isn’t enough water to grow feed needed to raise animals as a food source.
“It’s a story of the center of North America exporting to, and feeding, the rest of the world,” said Miller.
Still, the volume of grain shipments has declined in recent years as more ethanol manufacturing plants populate the Midwest, he said. These plants turn corn into alcohol fuel for motor vehicles, a process that has gained momentum with mounting concern over U.S. reliance on foreign oil.
Ethanol plants buy corn in huge quantities on advance contracts, meaning farmers agree on a price a year or more before the harvest season. They are assured of a buyer but they could also end up getting less for their corn than the current market rate.
That’s something Brian Hager, a Mankato, Minn., farmer, said he’s unwilling to risk. When the price is right, he said, he trucks his corn 60 miles north to an elevator in Savage, Minn., site of a barge dock served by Upper River Services. He’d rather wait to see what the foreign markets will bear.
Farmers like Hager keep big barge companies Ingram, Cargill and American Commercial in business. They are able to move bulk goods on the river far cheaper than their competitors can by truck, rail or air freight.
Ingram, the largest operator, maintains 4,000 barges. Jerry Knapper, an assistant vice president, said that in addition to grain, coal is among the prize cargos.
An estimated 180 million tons of coal are shipped annually on the Mississippi River and its tributaries, said Knapper. That’s enough coal to satisfy the energy needs of a city the size of Chicago for several years.
Gasoline and other liquid petroleum products account for 200 million tons of shipping annually on the Mississippi, government records show.
Oil refineries are located all along the river, but they’re heavily concentrated in Louisiana between New Orleans and the offshore drilling platforms that pump crude oil from the Gulf.
Still, the Mississippi is not strictly business. Tourist and pleasure boats mix with towboats and barges. No city-to-city passenger boats, though. They vanished with the end of the steamboat era in the mid-19th century. Now, only a few true steamers work the river as tourist attractions.
More common are excursion boats such as the diesel-engine-powered Memphis Queen III sternwheeler owned and operated by Captain Lozier. They are heavy on charm and memory of the river’s rambunctious past, holding up to 400 people for day cruises, weddings, dinner parties and other special events.
Lozier, whose grandfather built the three-deck, 110-foot Memphis Queen III, sells $20 tickets for an afternoon on the river. For that, you get a nostalgic trip through the heyday of cotton, cutthroat commerce, frontier preachers and a westward looking America.
You also learn that Samuel Clemens took his pen name Mark Twain from a term used by riverboaters to measure the Mississippi’s depth. They would drop a chain in the water, reckon how long until it hit bottom and then call out the depth as “mark three” or “mark four” and so on. Each mark meant a fathom or six feet. “Mark Twain,” legend goes, was two fathoms.


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Stories about Twain and his literary characters, especially Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, live large on the lower Mississippi, that section of the river from St. Louis to New Orleans.
There’s adventure and history at every turn. Riverboat restaurants in St. Louis, a five-block-long river walk in Memphis, Civil War stories in Vicksburg and Natchez, jazz and Cajun food in New Orleans.
Tall tales and sternwheelers are mostly a faded memory on the upper Mississippi, the shallower section of the river that runs from St. Louis north to Minneapolis-St. Paul. Here people talk about a waterway that flows through a system of 29 locks, dams and levees built 100 years ago. They make it possible for the Mississippi to be the great waterborne highway that it is.
But the dams and other water-control structures haven’t deterred the wrath of nature. A great flood in 1927 sent the Mississippi way over its banks from Illinois to the Gulf Coast, inundating river towns and stranding tens of thousands of people without food or shelter. Scores of refugees were swept away with the rampaging river.
The most memorable recent floods occurred in 1973, 1983 and 1993, when a six-week deluge created a disaster of epic proportions in towns along the upper Mississippi, causing 30 deaths and billions of dollars in property and crop damage.
Yet nothing matched Hurricane Katrina’s disruption of commerce on the Mississippi in 2005. Floodwaters from ruptured levees shut down shipping traffic into and around New Orleans for weeks.
Catastrophes such as these are rare. But they are also periodic reminders, scientists say, that the Mississippi River is a creature of nature that should never be underestimated.
“The 1927 flood instigated a new way of thinking about the river – and our relationship to it,” said Denise Reed, a University of New Orleans geology professor.

Next: A muddy dilemma

Dan Nienaber is a CNHI News Service Elite Reporter Program fellow. He writes for the Mankato, Minn., Free Press.

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