Big River: Can the Mississippi build America again?

WINFIELD, Missouri — In the story of America, the Mississippi River is a character unto itself, a rough-hewn founding father of the West: restless, implacable, more powerful than law or nature.

Its biographer, Mark Twain, ridiculed the idea that it could ever be tamed: “Ten thousand River Commissions,” he vowed, “cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, Go here, or Go there, and make it obey.”

And yet, after the river had propelled the country’s westward expansion, the government did just that. Hoping to make the nation’s largest river more predictable and commercial, engineers dotted it with dams and locks. The dams control water levels, the locks let through barges carrying the spoils of the nation’s farmland — corn, soybeans and grain.

The first of these structures — walls of concrete that can stretch a third of a mile from bank to bank — went up just before Twain died in 1910.

Now, President Joe Biden’s administration is trying to remake the river yet again. It has $2.5 billion at its disposal for a massive down payment on river transportation from the bipartisan infrastructure law. It represents the first significant upgrade to river infrastructure — the 25,000 miles of inland waterways through which barges and freighters pass every day — since the New Deal.

Biden is betting that the very waterways that built America once can now help to solve its climate threat, because carrying a ton of corn or soybeans in a barge consumes nine times less fossil fuel than by truck and half that of train. And he has on his side powerful Republican senators who disproportionately represent states in the heartland.

“When I voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill, I was voting for exactly this type of federal support for critical infrastructure that Iowans depend on,” boasted Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) after the Biden administration sent nearly $830 million to a pair of lock and dam projects near and dear to corn and soybean growers in the region.

Proponents point to the vast capacity of barges: one 15-barge tow floating down the river can haul the equivalent of six locomotives and 216 train cars, or 1,050 tractor-trailers.

“It’s the most efficient way by far to move tonnage,” boasted Lt. Col. Joseph Sahl, the former Nashville District commander for the Army Corps of Engineers. “From an environmental standpoint, it’s also the cleanest way to move materials and tonnage.”

Fewer trucks on the road would lessen congestion, decreasing traffic jams. That would cause less wear and tear on the highway system — which hundreds of millions of Americans rely on daily to get to work but is often marred by potholes and road work delays.

But not everyone agrees the money is being well spent. Ecologists warn of damage to fish and wildlife, not to mention pollution of inner waterways. They challenge the notion that shipping is more efficient than train or truck transport, especially if one considers the further development of battery technology and cleaner engines.

They point out that merely operating the locks and managing the river will require some ongoing emissions, and no one is sure exactly where the freight will be off-loaded and how much truck travel will be necessary even if the Mississippi is utilized as a freight superhighway. And then there is the damage damming up rivers does to endangered species and fragile ecosystems.

“There is a lot of myth around inland navigation, a lot of romanticism, that really doesn’t bear out,” said Olivia Dorothy, a restoration director for American Rivers, a nonprofit that fights for natural rivers.

Water from over 40 percent of the mainland United States flows into the Mississippi River, which means 31 states between the Appalachian Mountains and the Rockies send their rainfall and snowmelt into its maw. It swallows whole rivers — the Ohio, Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas and Iowa Rivers to name a few — before taking all their water past New Orleans and into the Gulf of Mexico. It’s so old dinosaurs probably drank from it.

Yet for all of its admirers like Twain, whose tales of steamboats and rafting adventures added to the 19th century allure of the river and the West, its untamed ways often frustrated those who envisioned its vast potential for commerce.

Thomas Jefferson, for one, was disappointed to learn that it didn’t meet the Pacific Ocean. He found that out only after he bought the river from the French in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase.

Still, the river quickly became the main transportation corridor bisecting the continental U.S. But as keel boats gave way to barges, and steamboats to freighters, the river needed to be tamed for smoother navigation.

The essence of water management is to make a waterway carved by nature into something more controllable by man. Locks are essentially elevators for boats — a vessel goes into a chamber that either empties water to ease the boat downstream or fills with water to lift the boat for travel upstream. To make the ebb and flow of the Mississippi more predictable, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built 29 locks and dams north of St. Louis, in the places where the river is least predictable.

As America reached toward the peak of its global might following World War II, the locks and dams helped the river carry coal for power, agricultural commodities for food and even solid rocket boosters destined for outer space.

But then, for many decades, Washington largely sat on its hands while the elaborate system built over generations to make the river navigable failed. Public investments in railroads and, later, interstate highways supplanted those in river transportation. They sent freight traveling by different means.

Now, the vestiges of the concrete locks are crumbling and inefficient, both too narrow and too short for today’s tugs hauling dozens of barges. They slow the pace of commerce and mitigate some of the cost advantages of hauling goods by barge over other forms of transport.

So the question remains: Can this aged and tired infrastructure be updated to meet the needs of a rapidly changing, high tech economy, while also allowing the U.S. to continue being the world’s pantry? And can it restore prosperity to what Twain called “the body of the nation” — the heartland around the Mississippi — that it built in the first place?

The pair of projects that got Grassley excited are known by the unexciting monikers of Lock and Dam 22 and Lock and Dam 25. Neither of them are in Iowa. But they are both downstream of Grassley’s political base: Iowa farmers.

That means any barges of corn and soybeans his farmers want to send to foreign markets have to pass through them, or else the farmers are stuck paying for higher shipping costs on trucks and trains, cutting into their already thin margins.

Lock and Dam 25 — just “Twenty-Five” to those who talk often about such things — is beyond a clump of trees on a Missouri cornfield’s eastern edge, straddling the river as it separates Illinois from Missouri.

Built in 1939, Twenty-Five lacks the art deco detail of other projects of the era with its low-slung profile, hovering over the water. It’s nothing like the Hoover Dam, which towers over the Colorado River like the Colossus of Rhodes.

Instead, all its tons of steel and concrete seem thin and pale amid the mighty, muddy Mississippi, leaving the impression of a hair clip holding back a vital braid of American water.

Now, as part of the new infrastructure program, floating cranes are at work to expand its size.

Boats on the Mississippi now tow a dozen or more barges where they used to tow nine. It’s impossible to move that many barges through a small lock like Twenty-Five without a whole bunch of strenuous and often dangerous work.

As a boat approaches Twenty-Five, crews untie the barges, send some barges through, secure them so they don’t float away, then go back and fetch the rest of the barges, send them through the lock, then tie everything back together.

It takes hours. It takes crew time. It slows everything down. It backs up traffic on the river.

Corn and soybean growers commit their products to this lugubrious process because shipping on the river is still far cheaper compared with trucking or trains. But the delays are a hindrance, nonetheless: The goal for many farmers is to have all locks be big enough to handle a full entourage of barges without all the untying and tying and waiting. That means making locks on the Mississippi twice the size they are now.

Barge advocates have watched wistfully as the nation’s roads were expanded into highway and highways were turned into superhighways. As this happened, water infrastructure didn’t keep up and shipping traffic along the Mississippi has fallen by several thousand lock trips per year for a variety of reasons, including the choke points at locks like Twenty-Five.

“Other modes of transportation slowly absorbed the inefficiency that was created in the system,” said Jim Tarmann, managing director of the Illinois Corn Growers Association.

The cost advantage of a bigger lock is a “penny and a half” for bushels of corn, Tarmann said. That may not seem like much, but America exports over a billion bushels of corn alone each year.

There is also the matter of foreign competition. Other countries that export agricultural products are making their own improvements to river transportation, cutting the costs of sending their products overseas. America’s growers suffer in comparison. A recent report by the Eno Center for Transportation talked about the natural navigability of the Amazon that gives a boost to South American farmers, along with improvements made by state-backed enterprises in China that have turned the Yangtze River into the world's busiest freight waterway.

“They are going to hand us our lunch if we can’t get our inland system figured out,” said Paul Rohde, a vice president at the Waterways Council, the prime lobbying group for American river transportation.

He might have meant that literally, given how much grain moves on these rivers.

The government’s perceived neglect of the Mississippi and other inland waterways plays into the political insecurities of heartland states: A sense that the nation’s attention is fixated on the coasts, particularly when it comes to the economy.

Today, the nation’s largest ports — on the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean — get most of the attention when people even bother to talk about shipping, which has been more than usual lately because of the pandemic-related supply chain issues.

The coast remains such a powerful image that agriculture boosters of the Mississippi River have labeled the area around St. Louis as “the ag coast of America,” an attempt, it seems, to make the river towns as important as coastal commerce.

Even smaller towns are also hoping to put themselves back on the map of global capital.

Paducah, Kentucky, is one such example. In addition to being the quilt-making capital of the U.S., Paducah was quite literally forged by the rivers. A massive flood wall holds back the river, while a small town in middle America churns on behind it.

The town attracted early settlers because of its proximity to the confluence of the Ohio and Tennessee rivers, but its founding is credited to none other than William Clark of the Lewis and Clark explorer duo who charted the American West. Clark was deeded the land by the Supreme Court in 1827, and the town thrived as steamboats churned through its ports.

“The river literally shaped Paducah; the river’s why we’re here,” said Polly Brasher, the former executive director of the Inland Waterways Museum in Paducah.

The aspirations of the U.S.’ inner waterway system is on display at Kentucky Lock in Grand Rivers, Kentucky. One of the busiest transit points in the country for bulk cargo — from coal to corn to solid rocket boosters — the operational lock, completed in 1942, is showing its age. The lock is a short drive on the interstate from Paducah, and its dam rises into view on approach like a concrete waterfall — a modern marvel of the early 20th century.

When POLITICO visited Kentucky Lock, a gearbox responsible for hauling open the massive gates that hold back water from flooding miles of the surrounding area had recently failed. The lead time to replace the gearbox — built in the 1940s — is about a year, requiring engineers to quickly think up a stopgap repair. Until they successfully got it working again, the duty of opening the gate was shifted to a big red winch high above the water.

But Kentucky Lock is in the midst of a renaissance. To walk atop Kentucky Lock, you first have to traverse high above a gaping hole in the earth above what will soon be the new and improved Kentucky Lock. Directly adjacent to the existing lock are towering walls of new concrete, a shiny new gate with no rust and a bustling construction site.

Construction workers hang high above the hole on cranes and platforms, and buzzing beneath them are excavators and trucks shuffling earth. The project has been going on for nearly two decades, with fits and starts due to financial constraints. But it was recently funded to completion by the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, ushered through Congress and signed by Biden.

When it’s complete, the new and larger lock and dam will ease congestion at Kentucky Lock significantly, making long backups a thing of the past. Broken gearboxes will also be history — the new lock gates will be powered by hulking hydraulics.

Kentucky Lock is further along than the other projects funded by the infrastructure law because it has a powerful advocate: Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky senator who is the Republican leader. At Kentucky Lock, the past and the future can be seen right next to each other. And so can the promise.

“The industry has gotten bigger than the infrastructure, at the end of the day that’s the story,” said Jeremiah Manning, the resident engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers at Kentucky Lock.

Barge transportation is cost effective in part because the government charges relatively little to use the river systems: It’s more expensive to take a short jaunt down the New Jersey Turnpike than it is to pass through the two dozen locks that help move goods hundreds of miles through the Mississippi River system.

In fact, it costs nothing for anyone to use the locks, which is one of the reasons there wasn’t much money sitting around for them as they fell apart. Instead, repairs and maintenance are funded by a tax on fuel that barges use. At 29 cents a gallon, it’s still less than the state gas taxes many car drivers across the country pay. The fund has been chronically depleted.

The shipping industry insists, rightly, that at least they pay something. Others that benefit from locks and dams — nuclear power plants that draw water from water stopped up by dams, shoreline property owners along the lake-like stretches of water formed by dams — pay nothing into the system.

So, most people have been waiting for the federal government to pony up. And, finally, it seems, it is with the infrastructure law.

But there’s a new obstacle: Critics in the environmental movement aren’t so sure all the claims about how great shipping is for the environment hold up.

That hesitation could be a problem because one of the new pitches for a river commerce revival is that it’s better for the environment.

In the decades since the New Deal, dams have become anathema to environmental groups. They are after all massive piles of concrete that block up rivers. The barge industry dismisses this, citing the benefit of barges over gas guzzling trucks and diesel burning trains — and the fact that the locks and dams are already there.

“You can’t just be a river environmentalist, you have to take the whole bigger picture when it comes to the environment,” said Paul Rhode, the shipping industry spokesperson.

But there is a real fight brewing because, two decades ago, environmental groups in the upper Mississippi, including The Nature Conservancy, struck a deal with the Army Corps and the shipping industry: They would drop objections to major lock and dam upgrades if projects to restore nature were just as well funded as lock and dam projects.

The deal requires that there be “comparable progress” between ecosystem projects and infrastructure projects such as the Lock 25 upgrade.

“Comparable progress” is one those phrases written into big federal deals, particularly ones about the environment, that were put there as a compromise and left there to fight over for years to come. (Other examples: Appalachian coal mining companies have to restore mountains to “approximate original contour” after they have blown off their tops to get coal. The federal government can regulate “waters of the United States,” a term the Supreme Court has recently redefined after years of litigation.)

At the moment, the comparison in dollars to dollars doesn’t look great, said Gretchen Pfeiffer, who worked on the issue for the Nature Conservancy. To her, it’s “lopsided” because there has been about $800 million put into locks and dams, but only $100 million for ecosystem restoration.

Lock advocates argue the figures look the way they do because locks require large upfront capital costs. But Pfeiffer, who has been working on the issue for decades, is worried that the trend won’t change.

“The groups that comes up behind me are going to have to push and push and push to make sure that does not happen,” she said.

But there are also more aggressive environmental groups that did not agree with the deal, including American Rivers, the group that each year puts out a list of the most endangered rivers.

After Congress approved the “comparable progress” plan, the group agreed not to sue if it was followed. But now Dorothy, of American Rivers, said there is the sense that the Army Corps has been “gaslighting us this whole time.”

The group has challenged some of the assumptions built into the deal, including the very basic premise about river transportation being better than trains or trucks.

About an hour and half away from Twenty-Five is Lock and Dam 22, the other project Grassley cheered on. This is where one of the first major ecosystem projects — a fish passage — is being considered but not yet under construction. The fish passage would be a sort of maze that fish could use to gradually ascend from the downstream side of the dam toward the headwaters, the kind of movement a dam inevitably blocks.

The project is a bit more controversial than when it was first envisioned, though, because invasive carp are in the river. Now there is worry this project to make it easier for native fish to move could also make it easier for invasive fish to invade further.

The Army Corps is working to prevent this invasion, though. One idea is that because certain carp don’t like light, the fish passage might be open to the sky, with the idea being that the sun would scare away the invasive carp from crossing the dam.

But across the top of the dam, where the river lapped at a berm, the future site of this all-important fish passage, there was a portentous sight.

A dead fish was there, undulating in the river’s tide, destined never to cross the dam alive.