‘Punched
in the Face’: U.S. Floods Snarl Trucks, Trains, Barges
8
June, 2019
Hundreds
of barges are stalled on the Mississippi River, clogging the main
circulatory system for a farm-belt economy battered by a relentless,
record-setting string of snow, rainstorms and flooding.
Railways
and highways have been closed as well, keeping needed supplies from
farmers and others, and limiting the crops sent to market. For Chris
Boerm, who manages transportation for Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., one
of the nation’s largest agricultural commodities dealers, the
weather is an unyielding, ever-changing challenge.
He
and his co-workers spend time carefully planning out the quickest way
to get supplies to the people that need them, he said. But it’s
tough staying ahead of the drenching rain.
“It’s
sort of like Mike Tyson’s quote, everybody’s got a plan until you
get punched in the face, right?” Boerm said by telephone. “Every
day we come in and we’ve got a plan. But then it rains three inches
somewhere overnight where it wasn’t expected, and the plan
changes.”
That
means supplies they plan to move on one river may need to be rerouted
to a different waterway, or offloaded onto a rail car or a truck,
with the hope they won’t be delayed by the weather as well. For
instance, when water reaches the wheel bearings on a freight car in a
siding, it can’t be hauled long distances without an inspection,
yet another potential delay.
At
just two locks along the upper Mississippi, almost 300 barges are
being held in place as a result of high water and fast currents,
according to Waterways Council Inc., which tracks barge movements.
And hundreds more are waiting in St. Louis, Cairo, Illinois and
Memphis, Tennessee, said Deb Calhoun, the council’s senior vice
president.
“It’s
a big bottleneck,” Calhoun said.
The
contiguous U.S. had its wettest January to May on records dating back
to 1895, according to the U.S. National Centers for Environmental
Information in Asheville, North Carolina. Nebraska, Kansas and
Missouri had their rainiest May on record, the center’s data shows,
while Arkansas, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Wisconsin and Illinois were
all in the top 10.
Since
last year, heavy snow fell on the Midwest and Great Plains, melting
into saturated ground early in the spring. In March, a so-called bomb
cyclone drenched Nebraska and Iowa with record rain and snow, sending
the Missouri River out of its banks and creating a multi-state
disaster area.
While
high waters stop barge traffic, they also carry other dangers. Flood
waters have closed off Interstate highways on a number of occasions
and water itself. That overwhelms farm fields, sewer and septic
systems and industrial plants along its banks, which can become quite
toxic as it flows away from the river beds.
“We
dealt with a wet fall, and then record snowfall in many places,”
said Tim Eagleton, senior engineering specialist for FM Global, an
industrial insurer. “Of course, all that melts and comes down the
Mississippi. Not only that, but we have had 200%-plus rainfall over a
large part of that basin for months, and then a record-wet May in a
lot of places.’
The
bottom line, according to Eagleton: “Very long duration flooding on
the Mississippi River that can really start to wear on people.’’
Almost 200 miles of the Mississippi has been shut down, he said.
Farmers
are definitely feeling the crunch.
Iowa
corn farmer Bob Hemesath, whose farm is about 35 miles west of the
Mississippi River in Decorah, had planned to deliver about 20,000
bushels of corn to a Bunge Ltd. facility in McGregor in March and
April. Instead, he ended up sending the grain to a local ethanol
plant because the facility was closed due to high water levels and
still remains shuttered.
He
knows neighboring soybean farmers who are waiting to send their crops
down the river as well. U.S. farmers still hold a lot of crops in
their silos from their 2018 harvest because selling hasn’t made
financial sense during the U.S.-China trade war, slow demand and
slumping prices. Now, with northbound and southbound river traffic
stalled, Hemesath is worried about what the barge backlog is going to
look like this fall.
“We
are going to be missing almost three months of river traffic, I don’t
even know how we will get caught up," he said. “If the river
facilities don’t have barges that are caught up on old crop they
won’t be able to ship new crop. It’s another stress for farmers.”
Among
Boerm’s worries is that with the water levels so high -- and for so
long -- there isn’t a lot of visibility yet on what the long-term
impact to the waterways may be.
Boerm
was an ADM manager in 1993, when more than 17 million acres were
flooded across nine states in June through August. He recalls working
with the Red Cross in Hardin, Illinois, sandbagging the bloated
waterways and helping evacuate homes. The recent flooding is just as
formidable a beast, he said.
“In
’93, the flood was really kind of concentrated in Iowa and the
Upper Midwest," Boerm said. "This has been much more
expansive, getting all the inland rivers," affecting the entire
Mississippi, the Arkansas River, the Illinois River and the Ohio
River.
It’s
impossible to know the full fallout until the waters recede, Boerm
added.
That
could take some time, according to Jeff Graschel, service
coordination hydrologist with the Lower Mississippi River Forecast
Center in Slidell, Louisiana. “A lot of locations since December to
January have been above flood levels, and they probably will be in
June to July,’’ he said. “We have another month or two before
we can get some of these areas to go below flood.’’
Waterways
near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Natchez, Mississippi and Cairo,
Illinois, have all set records for the length of the flood by weeks,
Graschel said.
The
repercussions will ripple through the economy for the rest of the
year, said Jon Davis, chief meteorologist with RiskPulse, a weather
analytics firm in Chicago. When crops that have been sowed late in
the season to start moving to market, barge, truck and train traffic
will soon be stretched thin, he said.
“There
are a couple of things that make this situation incredibly unique,
the first of which is the longevity of the flooding, ’’ according
to Davis. “The other factor is how widespread everything is.’’
Corn
and soybean planting lags the five-year average, and grain shipments
on the Mississippi, Arkansas and Ohio Rivers have already dropped
well below last year and the three-year averages, according to the
U.S. Department of Agriculture.
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