The consequences of failure to address maintenance dredging issues effectively is probably being felt nowhere more severely than in America’s Great Lakes.<\/p>\n
Here it’s taken years of political pressure to cut through the barriers to sanction dredging – but it’s going to take several more before the currently-choked waterways are back to federally-agreed depths.<\/p>\n
At its peak there were estimated to be about 18m m3<\/sup> of silt to be cleared. That volume is now declining because, at last, the country’s Army Corps of Engineers, who do all of America’s maintenance dredging, have turned their attention to the Lakes, whose ships serve the nation’s industrial heartland.<\/p>\n Last month, Glen Nekvasil, vice-president, corporate communications for the Lake Carriers’ Association, and secretary of the Great Lakes Maritime Task Force (GLMTF), was looking forward to hearing an update from the engineers about the scale of their progress, expecting the backlog to be closer to 16m metres.<\/p>\n He predicts several years of work costing well in excess of $200m to turn the Lakes’ dredging crisis into history, and is delighted that political lobbying has turned the tide in their favour. But it’s only right that the work is done, he says, pointing out that all of his country’s dredging is funded by a tax on cargo – the Harbour Maintenance Trust Fund (HMTF) – though not all of the revenues raised are spent on maintaining harbours.<\/p>\n “There’s no denying that the US has not been focusing on infrastructure spending recently. Money not spent on harbour maintenance has been used to paper balance the budget for all the other things the US has to do right now, like fighting wars,” he added.<\/p>\n The scale of the Lakes’ problem is enormous. Iron ore shipments are bumping along the bottom – quite literally – at about half of what they were a year ago. Admittedly the global financial crisis resulted in the world’s steelmakers hunkering down and trimming capacity, so there was less demand for their bulk raw materials of ore and coal, but that serves only to mask the chronic dredging issue that’s been squeezing the whole of the Great Lakes system.<\/p>\n The Lake Carriers’ Association, representing 18 carriers operating 55 ships, believes lack of dredging by the US Army Corps of Engineers has reduced each payload by as much as 6% – or 5,000 tons.<\/p>\n And it’s not just iron ore that’s affected; the Association’s members also move limestone and cement for construction, and coal for power generation. This latter commodity is down by about a third. But those are generalisations. Lakes draught has been reduced by as much as seven feet in places, and reductions of four feet and more aren’t uncommon. The greatest loss of draught was at Dunkirk on Lake Erie, which has simply been closed because the available draught means it’s no longer commercially viable.<\/p>\n So what then for the power station there? Its coal now comes by rail, hauled by locomotives using much more fuel per ton of cargo than ships.<\/p>\n The same’s true of Tonawanda, a little further to the north east up the southern shore of Lake Erie. Although it’s still open, its coal was taken there on a freight rate that included calls to Dunkirk. Since a solitary delivery call isn’t cost-effective, Tonanwanda must get its coal by rail too. “In reality, the dredging crisis has victimised the environment in western New York State,” says Mr Nekvasil.<\/p>\n The problem has been ongoing for years, albeit masked through the nineties by naturally-higher water levels – but that situation is currently reversed, with record lows being forecast.<\/p>\n The scale of the implications of a lack of dredging is immense, not only for port operators but on a much wider scale, in terms of the environment, infrastructure, quality of life and prospects for other industries. Prevented from using ports to their best advantage by what’s hidden beneath the water, shippers must scale the mountain by another face, and turn instead to rail, as in the case of Dunkirk, or to road transport. Either would be catastrophic for ports and shipping, they argue.<\/p>\n As if that weren’t enough, the GLMTF cites the example of a baker’s dozen of lake vessels whose operations will be restricted by forthcoming legislation about their engine emissions. In 2008, those vessels carried 29m tonnes of cargo. To move that another way, calculates the Task Force, would need 1.1bn lorry journeys or 290,000 railway wagons.<\/p>\n The impact on the economy of too-shallow waterways has implications in all sorts of ways. Says Mr Nekvasil: “Since a vessel’s carrying capacity is not being fully utilised (when it’s forced to operate light loaded), the operator cannot offer the best freight rate. The customer is not able to receive or ship all the cargo it needs.<\/p>\n “Shortfalls in raw materials then translate into less production at the nation’s factories and, ultimately, fewer opportunities for employment, with consequent damage to the national economy.<\/p>\n “In the last financial year the US Government collected $1.6bn under the HMTF, but spent only $776m on harbours. And when money has been spent, the spend has been weighted to rivers,” he says. “For the Great Lakes it’s like driving up to the pay booth on a toll road, paying the charge, and being told: ‘The road’s closed, but we’re keeping your money anyway’.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Americas Great Lakes understand the true pain of neglected maintenance dredging, as Stuart Pearcey finds out<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":1266,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-1265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-equipment"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1265"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1267,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1265\/revisions\/1267"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1265"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=1265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}