The unseen highway: America’s inland waterways
Posted On July 26, 2024
We all know that trucks move a lot of goods and materials in the United States. We see them every day on the highway.
What many of us don’t often see, however, is how one-third of the nation’s GDP is transported every year: It’s shipped by boat or barge on inland waterways.
About 500 million tons per year are moved across the 12,000 miles of inland waterways in the U.S., and over 540,000 jobs are in some way connected to inland shipping.
While we may not see that unless we’re hanging out by the New Orleans riverfront or in one of the many cities and towns on major waterways, our guest in a recent episode of “What’s Working with Cam Marston” sees it every day.
Cline Jones, Jr., is Executive Director of the Tennessee River Valley Association and the Tennessee-Cumberland Waterways Council. In that role, he helps see that inland waterway shipping and the locks and dams it depends upon are operating smoothly.
“I think of it as being out of sight, out of mind,” he said of inland waterway shipping. “For most people, a lock is something you put a key in.”
Over half the nation’s locks and dams are still in service long after they were designed to be, however, and failures happen all the time, disrupting shipping for months. “Some serious reinvestment has to be done, and that’s one of our jobs: To identify the most critical areas and make sure the Corps of Engineers has what they need to initiate those repairs and modernization,” Jones said.
The problem is that replacing a lock is very expensive and can take more than a decade to complete – and funds are appropriated by Congress annually, often leading to uncertainty as to how much money will be directed toward a project from one year to the next.
“We’ve seen some dollars go toward the program,” Jones said of infrastructure improvements, “but not nearly enough.”
Inland waterway shipping is important because extremely large quantities of material can be moved in one shipment. One tow boat can move several barges at one time, with a capacity of 1,000 tractor-trailer loads.
Barges move all sorts of materials — asphalt, sand and aggregates, even rockets. They were used to move rocket components from Huntsville during the Appollo program. Today, a specialized ship called the “Rocket Ship” moves rockets from Huntsville and Decatur to Cape Canaveral and elsewhere.
“If you got up this morning and you had a weather report with a satellite or if you made a cell phone call across the country,” Jones said, “you did so because of inland barge transportation and the ability to move these rockets from their assembly sites to their launch sites.”