Barge traffic resumed on the Lower Mississippi River in early February after a nearly week-long closure caused by an oil spill near Vicksburg, Miss.
A 16-mile stretch of the river at Vicksburg reopened to barge traffic on Feb. 2 after being closed for six days because of light crude oil spilling from a damaged barge (GM Feb. 4, p. 13). The barge was one of two that struck a railroad bridge near Mile Marker 436 at 1:30 a.m. on Jan. 27, causing crude to leak from the vessel’s 80,000-gallon hold.
The Coast Guard announced on Feb. 2 that north and southbound towboat traffic had resumed in the Vicksburg area, and that the safety zone had been reduced from 16 miles to one mile as cleanup efforts continued. As many as 71 towing vessels and 1,056 barges had been stalled by the closure as of Jan. 30, before the Coast Guard began allowing small tows to transit the area in scheduled intervals to reduce the backlog.
“The Coast Guard is no longer actively managing the flow of towboat traffic and we are minimizing the safety zone to a one-mile distance to ensure the safety of response crews still working on the MOC-12 barge,” Capt. William Drelling, federal on-scene commander for the Vicksburg oil spill, announced on Feb. 2.
The cause of the accident remains under investigation. Natures’ Way Marine LLC of Theodore, Ala., the owner of the towboat that was pushing the barges at the time of the accident, was named the responsible party, and as a result faces possible civil penalties under the federal Oil Pollution Act.
The Coast Guard reported on Feb. 6 that the oil cleanup effort at Vicksburg was complete, with no injuries or impacts to wildlife reported. Coast Guard personnel were joined by representatives from the Departments of Environmental Quality in Louisiana and Mississippi to perform extensive shoreline assessments. The Coast Guard said 5,300 feet of boom was deployed and some 159 workers brought to the scene to respond to the accident, with approximately 2,300 gallons of oil-water mixture recovered during the cleanup operation.
Commercial navigation was also improving on the Middle Mississippi, thanks to rock removal work and recent rains that have replenished drought-depleted river levels between St. Louis, Mo., and Cairo, Ill.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Feb. 5 announced that it had temporarily suspended rock removal work in the navigation channel at Grand Tower and Thebes, Ill., because rainfall had caused river levels there to rise, making it difficult for contractors to continue excavation. The Corps said rock removal will resume as river levels fall.
Grand Tower and Thebes lie within the problematic 200-mile stretch between St. Louis and Cairo, where the Corps has been working since December to maintain a 9-foot navigation channel amid severe drought conditions and historically low river levels. The low water threatened to suspend barge traffic on the Middle Mississippi in December and January, but commercial navigation has been able to continue thanks to the Corps’ rock removal efforts and to recent rain-fed rises in river levels.
The low water has been a source of concern for the fertilizer and other industries, particularly before the busy spring planting season. Those concerns were mostly allayed last week, however. “We have nothing to complain about as far as water,” one river terminal contact told Green Markets at midweek.
The Corps also announced last week that it has wrapped up its extended dredging season, which was mobilized in early July 2012 to combat the low river levels. The Corps said dredging operations in the Middle Mississippi went “well beyond the normal dredge season, which usually ends in early December,” and had removed more than 8 million cubic yards of sediment during the last six months.
The Corps said that amount is “