Mighty Mississippi: Moving barges into place

SAVAGE, Minn. —

Capt. James Williams is perched three stories high in the control room behind the throttles and the microphone of the Mary J, an old tug boat owned by Upper River Services.

"Watch the bump, we're moving kinda fast," Williams warns the deck hands below over the loudspeaker, pushing a barge loaded with corn into place.

The jolt that follows doesn't seem to bother them. They jump from the front of the Mary J onto another barge to fasten the two together with ratchets and cables.

The deck hands need to be nimble. They work seven docks along this stretch of Mississippi River.

Williams guides the empty barges to the loading docks and moves full barges to a staging area where they can be connected and towed to St. Paul for the long journey down the river to New Orleans.

Similar barge-bunching systems exist in dozens of ports along the Mississippi and its tributaries.

In Minnesota, the busiest part of the year for Williams is May through August, when most of the grain is flowing south. He said the work can test one's mettle.

"It's really stressful because if you make a mistake, you shut somebody else down," said Williams. "The whole time they're waiting, they're losing money."

When the barge business was booming a decade ago, he added, 60 full barges and 100 empties would move between Savage and St. Paul daily.

Now, traffic is down to about half that number on a busy day.

There are two major reasons for the decrease: fewer grain shipments from the upper Midwest and the residential development of property once used for grain storage.

Still, shipping bulk goods by barge remains competitive with rail, truck and air freight even if it is slower, because far less fuel is used to move tons of cargo by water over long distances.

"Grain companies are master distributors," said Jerry Knapper, a vice president of Ingram, one of the largest Mississippi shippers. "That's the only way they can survive."

Dan Nienaber is a CNHI News Service Elite reporter.