Article published December 22, 2008
ST. LAWRENCE
Expansion of seaway is unlikely, Corps says
$10B cost estimate in '03 was likely low
By TOM HENRY
BLADE STAFF WRITER
A highly ambitious - and incredibly costly - plan to widen and deepen the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway likely will be shelved by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers this spring.
That's according to Dave Wright, the project manager for a financial supplement to a multimillion dollar federal Corps study that has been evolving since 1999.
Mr. Wright, assistant chief of the Corps' operations in Detroit, said the decision to halt any further consideration of such unprecedented dredging, blasting, and redesign of the shipping channel has been made internally.
Barring any unforeseen developments, it will become official in early 2009 when the Corps releases the financial supplement to what is known as its reconnaissance study for the lakes, he said.
Widening and expanding the shipping channel would make the Port of Toledo and others across the Great Lakes region bigger players in the
shipping industry, generating jobs and providing more economic stability for America's heartland.
But it would cost untold billions of dollars and create myriad environmental issues.Even in 2003, officials - without having any real cost estimates developed - speculated that the type of widening and expansion of the system they envisioned would easily cost at least $10 billion, and likely more.
Just taking it to the point of having a precise feasibility study done would cost $20 million and take five to seven more years, according to estimates by Wayne Schloop when he was the Corps' project manager for the reconnaissance study.
He is now the agency's operations director for the Detroit district.
The Corps is shelving the plan before taking it to the feasibility stage because of the cost, the economy, and the environmental factors.
Dredging the channel to maintain its current minimum depths of 26 feet, 3 inches along the seaway and 25 feet, 5 inches in the lakes generates concerns among scientists about fish habitat in itself; going wider and deeper creates the potential for more harm.
The Corps had been considering a 35-foot channel
depth, one which would have required nearly 10 more feet of digging.
Frank Quinn, a retired National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration hydrologist who has studied Great Lakes water levels since the 1960s, has said the wild card would be the astronomical cost of blasting through bedrock in the Detroit and St. Marys rivers.
That itself would bring many more complex environmental issues to the table, officials have said.
The Corps has decided to recommend this spring that federal money be acquired to modernize Great Lakes ports and shipping channel locks, Mr. Wright said.
The Corps maintains locks in Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., and upstate New York.
"We're struggling right now just to maintain what we have and get enough funding to do that," Mr. Wright said.
A joint report released in the fall of 2007 that involved the collaboration of several U.S. and Canadian transportation agencies, as well as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Environment Canada, reaffirmed the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway's importance.
The report called the shipping channel "an incredibly valuable North American asset" that allows cargo to move far more efficiently than by rail or truck.
It said the seaway has the potential to become more important in the emerging world economy without major harm to the environment if it is simply modernized.
It said an expansion of the system is not viable.
"That took expansion off the table," Mr. Wright said.
The Corps also is faced with trying to adjust for the impacts of climate change years in advance.
Scientists have said lake levels could drop three to five feet this century if carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases continue to be released at today's pace.
"We recognize it [as an issue], but there's little we can do about it," Mr. Wright said.
The Great Lakes navigation system has barely changed since the St. Lawrence Seaway opened in the 1950s; no new locks have been built since 1969.
Environmentalists have feared that politicians would justify a need for the system's expansion, threatening progress the United States and Canada have made toward cleaning up the lakes with better sewage treatment and controls on industrial discharges
since signing the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement in 1972.
If expansion is ever revisited, the project would take years.
Congress spent 20 years debating whether to help build the Welland Canal, the passageway through Ontario that ships use to bypass Niagara Falls.
Once the project began in 1914, it took 17 years to construct.
Contact Tom Henry at:
thenry@theblade.com
or 419-724-6079.
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