Posted on: Monday, October 14, 2002
St. Lawrence Seaway facing obsolescence
By James V. Higgins
Detroit News
DETROIT — When the St. Lawrence Seaway opened the Great Lakes to expanded ocean-going shipping in 1959, Detroit dreamed of becoming a major port on the scale of Baltimore, Seattle or Long Beach.
It never happened.
But Congress may soon authorize a long-term study of the economic, engineering and environmental feasibility of modernizing the obsolete seaway system.
Experts agree that the system of locks, channels and ports that was optimistically called "the nation's fourth seacoast" in 1959 cannot exist forever in its present condition. With international trade growing, and industries rapidly becoming linked to global chains of commerce, the economic implications are huge.
They see only two choices: renovate, at a potential cost of billions of dollars; or watch ocean-borne shipping on the Great Lakes end.
"The truth is, unless these things happen, we're looking at another Erie Canal," said W. Steven Olinek, deputy director of the Detroit/Wayne County Port Authority.
That image has historical meaning for Detroit. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, linking the Hudson River and Lake Erie, was instrumental in the settlement of Michigan and the Midwest. An engineering marvel, it ultimately lapsed into disuse.
But its overall impact probably was greater in relative terms than the St. Lawrence Seaway, which never fulfilled its initial promise. Just as it opened, the ocean-borne freight industry was undergoing a fundamental change: the increased use of standard containers that, packed with a variety of goods, could be loaded without repacking on ships, trucks or rail cars.
Smaller container ships and tramp ocean freighters are still able to navigate the seaway, but the industry in the early 1960s moved toward construction of larger ships to accommodate more containers. Hapag-Lloyd, the German freight company, has launched a container ship that is twice as wide as the largest lock on the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes system.
As it stands today, roughly 95 percent of ocean container-carrying capacity cannot pass the locks to reach the Great Lakes' ports. In addition, the average depth of connecting channels on the system is about 25.5 feet, which is too shallow for many ocean-bound vessels.
The seasonal nature of the seaway is another drawback. Ice shuts it down three months a year. Technologies exist that would help extend the shipping season — a combination of ice-breaking ships and strategically placed booms to prevent ice floes from piling up in constricted spots. But they are used only sporadically.
The system is aging. Locks on the Welland Canal linking lakes Erie and Ontario are 70 years old, and are rapidly reaching a point where intensive and expensive maintenance will be required just to keep the status quo.
Another factor is the structure of seaway management. Part of the system is owned by Canada, part by the U.S. Seaway. On both sides, the system is administered through federal agencies: the U.S. Department of Transportation and Transport Canada. But, unlike virtually every other asset supervised by those departments, there has been no strategic planning about the future of the seaway.
"That is not the way you manage infrastructure," says Steve Fisher, executive director of the American Great Lakes Ports Association.
Those are the conditions the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers confronted in 1999 when Congress ordered it to conduct a preliminary survey of the seaway, its condition and potential benefits of improving it.
The corps' initial survey, completed earlier this year, concluded that a detailed study is warranted. It confirmed the deterioration of the system and its growing obsolescence. It projected that improvements could prompt a five-fold increase in container shipments.
Economic benefits could reach $1.44 billion a year, with creation of more than 100,000 jobs, the corps said.
