Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
8 July 2007
By Mike Wereschagin
"http://pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/rss/s_516257.html"
The captain carefully moved pairs of chrome throttles and worn, wood-handled rudder levers in the Titan's pilot house.
Beneath the Monongahela River's surface, two door-sized rudders swung to starboard as 6-foot propellers pushed enough water to make the 320-ton tow boat pirouette like a ballerina. A corner of the 118-foot-long vessel spun mere inches from the side of the waiting barges, tied three-by-three on the river's western bank.
The boat slid behind them, and four 5-ton winches tightened the steel cables that secured the barges to the tow boat. Deck hands untied the moorings, and the Titan was off.
Across Southwestern Pennsylvania, crews on towboats like the Titan quietly and unobtrusively move more than 43 million tons of cargo a year -- enough to fill more than 1.6 million tractor-trailers.
Port and shipping officials expect traffic on the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio rivers to surge by millions of tons during the next few years. Two planned ethanol plants will need a stream of corn to process into fuel, and environmental regulations are forcing coal-fired power plants to build scrubbers that will need as much as 500,000 tons of limestone each year, said James McCarville, executive director of the Port of Pittsburgh.
"What feeds everything is the power plants, and we feed the power plants," said James Grech, senior vice president of Consol Energy, an Upper St. Clair-based coal company that produced 67.4 million tons in 2006, the most coal of any company in the eastern United States. Consol owns Western Pennsylvania's largest fleet of barges and tows, including the Titan.
"It's one of the foundations of the economy in the area," he said about river transportation.
That foundation is crumbling. Century-old locks and dams need as much as $2 billion worth of work, including $43 million for "emergency repairs" to the eroding base of the Emsworth Lock and Dam, said McCarville.
Money is tough to obtain, though. River projects can take decades to complete, and it's difficult to convince lawmakers to divert hundreds of millions of dollars to such long-term projects, McCarville said. The Charleroi dam refurbishment, for example, began in 1996 and, after several delays in getting the money from Congress, won't be completed until as late as 2018.
"This whole system of locks and dams has so much to do with commerce in this region, with our quality of life," U.S. Sen. Bob Casey said Tuesday.
The federal government spends about $400 million a year on the inland waterways system. The Senate's version of the federal budget bill includes nearly $55 million in new money for lock and dam repairs in Western Pennsylvania. The money isn't in the House of Representatives' version, however, and the two bills must be reconciled so a budget can be passed.
Advocates say the consequences of postponing repairs could cascade beyond shippers and power plants. When a lock near Louisville, Ky., was shut down for two weeks in 2004, the Louisville International Airport came within two days of running out of the jet fuel it usually gets by barge.
"That may be bad enough, in terms of inconvenience to passengers, but Louisville is the main hub of UPS, and UPS relies on those planes," said John Moran, a lobbyist for the Waterways Council, an Arlington, Va.-based industry group.
About eight years after the Charleroi project began, one of the dam's two locks failed. If the other lock fails, tens of thousands of tons of coal from mines in Washington, Greene and Fayette counties would be stranded until it's repaired, McCarville said.
After rivers played a starring role in Pittsburgh's founding, local and federal governments spent the late 1800s and early 1900s building the massive infrastructure needed for reliable river transportation.
Sixteen gigantic reservoirs catch about 35 percent of the region's rainfall, preventing floods and releasing water during dry spells so the Mon, Ohio and Allegheny rivers remain at least nine feet deep, said Curt Meeder, chief of planning for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Pittsburgh Division.
Locks and dams were built to compensate for difficult geography, giving predictability to river depths that otherwise would fluctuate between more than 20 feet and an impassable 18 inches, McCarville said. Most of the century-old infrastructure was designed to last 50 years.
"It's not new anymore. Now we've got to figure out how to sustain the investment," McCarville said.
"It was and still is a world-class transportation system," Moran said. "People come to the United States ... to learn to do in their countries what we've done here."
Representatives from China and a group of South American nations, where systems of waterways are just now being built, recently consulted with American shipping and engineering officials, Moran said.
Despite being the oldest transportation system -- some refer to it as the nation's first superhighway -- river traffic is still the cheapest and cleanest way to move goods.
"The inland waterways system moves 16 percent of the nation's freight for 2 percent of the total freight cost," Moran said. One barge can hold as much cargo as 16 rail cars or 62 tractor-trailers.
Around Pittsburgh -- Mile 0 on the region's rivers -- the river cargo industry employs about 45,000 people and supports another 150,000 jobs, according to a 2006 Port of Pittsburgh study. The Port of Pittsburgh oversees all waterways in a 12-county region. It is the nation's second-largest inland port, behind the Port of Huntington, which sprawls over sections of Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia.
Those who make their living on rivers must contend with not only aging locks, but also recreational boaters, swift currents and ice-choked passages.
"The retirees come out around 5:30 a.m.," said W. Deane Orr, vice president of river operations for Consol. Orr began working on tow boats in 1967. "The trick (water) skiers are out around 7 a.m. Fishers and recreational boaters come out at 9 a.m. Families come out here from about 11 (a.m.) to 2 (p.m.). ... From 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., you can pretty much count on having the river all to yourself. Other than that, we're co-habitating."
Tows are monstrous. Once the Titan was secured to its nine barges, they operated as a single craft that was 78 feet wide and longer than two football fields. As it slalomed through bends in the Monongahela River, pilot Gary Murray, 34, of Point Marion, pointed the bow of his 3,000-ton vessel toward the shore, skidding through turns at around 6 mph.
During winter, tows ram full-speed into iced-over portions of river. If the impact doesn't break up the ice, the pilot must skid into it, sending a wave of water as far as 200 feet onto the ice shelf. The water's weight tips the ice, allowing the pilot to plow through.
Though it's a safer way to ship cargo than over rails or highways -- nine towboat crew members died in 2004, according to the most recent data available from the National Transportation Safety Board -- it can be perilous. In January 2005, three crew members of the towboat Elizabeth M drowned in the frigid Ohio River after the boat plunged over the Montgomery Locks and Dam.
Murray's father is an engineer with Campbell Transportation Co., the Dunlevy-based shipper that owned the boat.
Crew members must adapt to long periods away from families. They typically spend 14 days on the river, followed by seven days off. That, and the knowledge that only fellow towboat crews understand the job, breeds a camaraderie that transcends company affiliation.
"When the water's high, the whole fleet goes into protect mode," with towboats from all companies working together to keep barges from slipping away, Orr said. "We can't have barges breaking loose. That's number one."
In 1993, a towboat pilot on a fog-shrouded Alabama river pushed his barges into a railroad bridge, collapsing it. Minutes later, a passenger train plunged off the bridge, killing 47.
Crew members also must deal with the boredom of long journeys, and periods of frantic activity on the deck and on barges that sometimes are coated with inches of ice. In the lounge area of the Titan, crew members amuse themselves with a movie collection that includes "The Abyss," "Mystic River" and "Das Boot (The Boat)."
"It can get rough," said Titan deckhand Brad Srdich, 37, of Braddock. He has worked on towboats for two years, and weathered a winter storm that forced him to tie himself to the boat during his second day on the job.
It has its moments, though, Srdich said. As he finished frying fish fillets for lunch in the Titan's kitchen, he nodded toward the open door. Outside, sunlight danced on the green water rolling gently by.
"I love it," Srdich said. "I love it out here."
Mike Wereschagin can be reached at "mailto:mwereschagin@tribweb.com" or (412) 391-0927.