Ohio River States Angle for Marine Highway Corridor Designation

West Virginia and four other states hope to make the Ohio River "Marine Highway One"

The State Journal
20 May 2010
By Pam Kasey

Marine transport has taken on a new shine in Washington, D.C., and the Ohio River valley may benefit.

"We're looking at an opportunity to establish intermodal marketplaces in Louisville, Cincinnati, Huntington and the Weirton-Wheeling area," said West Virginia Public Port Authority Executive Director Patrick Donovan.

The opportunity comes as federal transportation officials prepare for an anticipated 73 percent increase in commercial shipping by 2035.

The U.S. Department of Transportation's idea is to identify and invest in "Marine Highway Corridors" that will conduct much of that traffic.

The positives: improved highway safety, reduced freight emissions and increased national security.

Ohio River waterways officials jumped at the chance.

"We showed up with 22 signators, five states, calling ourselves 'Marine Highway One,'" said Donovan.

The proposal from Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia anticipates two big changes in freight transport.

One change is not only an overall increase in shipping, but a particular increase in container traffic from the Pacific to the ports of New Orleans and Mobile, Ala., when a third Panama Canal shipping lane opens in 2014.

"What would move that product out of these coastal ports are traditionally tractor-trailers," Donovan explained.

"None of this works without our truck drivers, but at the end of the day we need to be able to effectively and efficiently move containers out of these coastal ports into inland markets."

And that suggests the other big change: inland container-by-barge shipping, a practice that Donovan said is common in Europe and Asia but has not yet been developed in the U.S.

"They're light years ahead of us on how to handle this freight in a maritime environment," he said.

Shipping containers entering Gulf ports and destined for points far north would be loaded onto barges and pushed up the Mississippi River to newly created intermodal marketplaces in the Ohio River valley.

"I mean Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Target -- the big regional distribution centers," Donovan said.

"They're all driven by the movement of 20- and 40-foot containers. Some low-hanging fruit is gas grills, lawnmowers, Christmas decorations -- things that have a long lead time in the logistics chain. They're low cost, and they can move container-by-barge even though it moves slower."

Louisville and Cincinnati already have container-by-rail, or "intermodal" rail facilities, and some associated warehousing and distribution; such facilities would be developed at Huntington and Weirton-Wheeling and all of the river ports would be reconfigured to handle containers.

Donovan sees a particular role for Weirton-Wheeling.

"When a tow leaves Weirton, it's a day and a half to Pittsburgh," he said

The locks between Weirton and Pittsburgh are too small to take the standard 15-barge tow at one time, resulting in inefficiencies as operators have to split their tows, lock them through separately and reattach them on the other side.

It's a trip that could be accomplished faster by rail from Weirton.

Container transport on the Ohio River would complement the intermodal facility proposed for Prichard, W.Va., on Norfolk Southern's Heartland railway corridor under construction from Norfolk, Va., to Chicago, and could encourage CSX to consider the Weirton area for an intermodal facility on its National Gateway from eastern ports to the midwest.

It's all going to mean jobs. Although he doesn't have numbers yet for the intermodal ports, an estimate Donovan commissioned for the Prichard facility came to 2,000 to 2,500 jobs. He believes Weirton alone could bring far more.

"Warehousing, distribution, truck drivers," he said, "$18-$22/hour jobs. It's a living wage."

Planning for the intermodal marketplaces would be undertaken using money flowing from a Marine Highway Corridor designation, Donovan said, and private investment would take over from there.

When he thinks of the other corridors that have been proposed, he is hopeful for a Marine Highway Corridor designation for Marine Highway One.

"There are these very clean interstate parallels that they were lining up very nicely: For the Intracoastal Waterway on the Atlantic coast, it was the I-95 Marine Highway. Or if you're on the Gulf Coast it was the I-10," he said.

"But we showed up and said, 'Pick a highway. I-70, I-64, I-77, I-79 -- what interstate do you want to relieve congestion on? Because we do it on maybe 10 of your most congested highways.'"

The designations are due out in early summer.

A Plea for Infrastructure


Shifting commercial traffic to the nation's navigable rivers would reduce dependence on imported oil, improve air quality and cut the cost of consumer goods.

But it requires planning and investment, say those who run the ports.

And it may call for an even less popular measure: sacrifice.

"We're at a critical time," said West Virginia Public Port Authority Executive Director Patrick Donovan when asked about the global network that transports containers by ship, barge, rail and truck.

"If the Appalachian region doesn't embrace the global supply chain opportunities of (CSX's) National Gateway and (Norfolk Southern's) Heartland Corridor, it will be just like the interstate highway system," Donovan said.

"The national economy went around us in the 1950s because we didn't have the highway system. Now we're in a global economy and without intermodal connectivities to the coastal ports -- Baltimore, Norfolk, Wilmington, Mobile, New Orleans -- and the ability to move containers into and out of those ports, we're not in the game."

Port of Pittsburgh Commission Executive Director James McCarville spoke sternly about the need for an attitude adjustment.

"As a nation, we have lived off of the investments our grandparents made," McCarville said.

Much of the great infrastructure, waterways included, was built during the Great Depression and two World Wars, he said.

"Think of the sacrifices people made because they believed this was an important thing to do. What I find very difficult to accept is that we don't have that same kind of belief anymore," he continued. "A lot of people talk about our debts being passed down to our grandchildren. We have another kind of debt, an infrastructure debt -- and if we don't own up and face it now, our grandchildren are going to have a much bigger debt to pay when it all falls apart. And it will probably all fall apart at the same time."