Edward Lotterman
You can take an applied economist away from their computer but you cannot stop their brain from recognizing economics as they travel our nation. Here are examples from rambling from St. Paul to Austin, Texas.
Overlooking the Missouri River in Atchison, Kan., just below Amelia Earhart’s childhood home, one sees why grain trucks from South Dakota and southwest Minnesota drive northeast to the Twin Cities before shipping grain toward New Orleans. This observation helps understand why we now are wasting billions deepening more seaports than we need.
Barge-loading docks on the Missouri River at Sioux City, Iowa, are only half as far by truck from South Dakota or southwest Minnesota as ones in the Twin Cities. Even those downriver in Omaha, Neb., are nearer than Savage or Shakopee. Driving south toward these Missouri river ports is more on the way to the Gulf of Mexico than the Twin Cities. Yet, despite spending billions improving navigability on the Missouri, grain shipments on it dwindle to near nothing. What gives?
Yes, topography disadvantages the Missouri. But we had already spent barge loads of dollars improving the Mississippi and Ohio rivers for transport. That engendered political demands for the same on the Missouri. That is hard for Congress to resist.
Start back two centuries. Steamboats on readily navigable interior rivers jump started a century of rapid economic development. New Orleans formed a natural seaport. From there, steamboats of diminishing sizes could make their way up the Mississippi, Ohio and Missouri rivers and smaller ones like the Tennessee, Arkansas and even the Wabash. Small steamboats made it to Mankato and to Fort Benton, Mont.
Cheap transportation facilitated selling farm, forest and mine outputs early on. Riverboats brought household supplies and raw materials for new industries.
Railroads were the eventual alternatives for extending shipments far from navigable rivers. Over time, steamboat service shrank back. But then, diesel-powered towboats pushing covered barges supplanted Mark Twain-era sternwheelers and deck cargos multiplied the payoff of low-cost water transport.
Congress funded initial construction for a series of locks and dams on the Upper Mississippi, above St. Louis, in June 1930, before the Depression really hit. But public works spending always has political support. Its employment-boosting potential attracted both presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt. By 1940, the system was complete from Alton, Ill., to coal and petroleum docks below the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis.
Similar work was done on the Ohio and Tennessee rivers. The Arkansas was being made navigable to Tulsa, Okla. A large hydroelectric and flood control dam was built at Fort Peck in northeastern Montana. Destructive floods in 1943 prompted funding of five more “main stem” dams in the Dakotas, completed by 1960.
Thus, making the Missouri as navigable as the Mississippi and the Ohio seemed sensible. Measured in 2026 dollars, billions were spent. But the Missouri was always a wild river twitching its bed from side to side across its flood plain. Six large dams upstream did make flows more regular. Yet floods in 1951, 1952, 1984 and 1993 still shifted the main channel enough to push Nebraska farm runoff into Kansas and vice versa. Ongoing dredging cost tens of millions.
Topography is the culprit. From the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri near St. Louis, the Mississippi rises only 330 feet in elevation to reach St. Paul. The Missouri rises nearly 700 feet to reach Omaha and then Sioux City. Mileages are similar, but the Missouri is steeper and its current faster.
That would be true even without 26 locks and dams on the Mississippi. The cumulative lift of these locks roughly equals the difference in elevation between St. Louis and St. Paul. The Corps of Engineers essentially built a stair-step of flat lakes joined by locks. Water moves south, so there is a current, but it is a mile or two per hour versus four to six on the Missouri. Anyone who has tried to paddle a canoe upstream knows what that means.
Why not build the same on the Missouri? The flat topography over most stretches make that impossible just as it would for the Mississippi itself south of St. Louis. The next best alternative is building structures that anchor the main channel in place and deepen it enough for barges. The most common measure is “wing dams.” These look like jetties or breakwaters jutting into the river from the bank that one wants to preserve. The dams are constructed of pilings driven into the riverbed with rock piled on either side.
Such wing dams are visible from the house in Atchison in which aviator Amelia Earhart was born. Every quarter of a mile in the river below is a wing dam projecting out and downstream from the bank on the Missouri side. Each is 300 or 400 feet long. Drive the river road or look at Google Earth and they go on for miles.
So there is a channel usually deep enough for barges needing nine feet. But few travel it, at least not carrying grain downriver or fertilizer up. The confined river is deep enough for barges, but often very narrow compared to the Mississippi. Sharp bends are numerous. Towboats must fight the current going upstream and fight to maintain control coming down when the river is high and fast. Instead of the nine 1,500-ton barge tows usual on the upper Mississippi, your see two or four on the Missouri. But crew numbers for each towboat are the same.
The result is that Missouri River barge cargo is dominated by sand and gravel carried short distances for local use, just as barges from Grey Cloud Island used to come to concrete plants in northeast Minneapolis. The most recent year’s stats for Sioux City list about 160 barges loaded for movement to St Louis or beyond. Numbers from the Twin Cities vary from 3,300 to over 5,000 in recent years.
So the dreams — or delusions — of past officials proved false. The U.S. Treasury laid out billions with little payback. Didn’t anyone foresee this?
Yes, there were skeptics. But Congress naturally errs on the side of funding too many projects. If you guarantee a nine-foot channel on two or three major rivers it is hard to deny it to one more.
We face the same situation right now with harbors. The original 1914 Panama Canal locks accommodated vessels up to 40 feet in draft. That largely was to accommodate warships. Most cargo vessels drew 25 to 30 feet at most. U.S. Harbors were dredged accordingly.
Those lock dimensions defined a “Panamax” ship. But many new tankers, bulk carriers and container ships are built to “post-Panamax” dimensions that need 50 feet of water. In virtually all harbors, deepening to 40 to 50 feet instead costs hundreds of millions of dollars. The bigger the ships, the fewer there are. We really don’t need every port to accommodate them. But if you fund the dredging of Mobile, Ala., and Miami, it is hard to consign Savanna, Ga., or Galveston, Texas, to secondary status. Thus we are dredging out at least 15 ports to a depth of 50 feet or more. Little of the additional capacity will be used.
The same phenomenon occurs with cities that want their airports to be “international” ones. That means the federal government has to supply U.S. Immigration, Customs and USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service personnel and facilities to handle incoming flights, even if only package-tour charters returning from Belize or St. Lucia. But politics are such that these local requests are hard to refuse.
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St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.
