The Waterways Council Inc., the Washington, D.C.-based organization that represents river users such as towboat operators and river cruise fleets, on May 6 began a social media and public relations push for an inland navigation construction organization to manage the overall construction of locks, dams and other projects on all U.S. rivers.
The council has worked closely with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and members of Congress for decades recommending reforms while strongly advocating the need for more investment in aging dam and dam infrastructure in the U.S. In February, the organization released a white paper detailing a study by the engineering firm HDR that said one organization would manage all of the river’s construction, rather than separate programs from Geography and the Upper, such as Upper Upper Ohio programs. construction, it would create efficiencies that cannot be unlocked through the methods that the Corps and congressional appropriations create for current separate programs.
“The nation’s inland waterways modernization program will benefit from being managed as a single, coordinated national program rather than a collection of competing individual projects,” said Tracy Zea, president and CEO of the Waterways Council. “Establishing an Inland Navigation Construction Organization (INCO) within the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would improve accountability, reduce costs, mitigate risk, and help Congress and American taxpayers achieve better returns on infrastructure investment.”
Zea also noted that construction programs, such as the dam upgrade and the $1.6 billion Montgomery Dam near Monaca, Pa., which began the past two years and has a projected construction schedule that extends through 2033, require more coordination with other projects throughout the river system than other infrastructure projects.
The council and representatives of districts along the rivers, such as Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minn.) — whose district includes the area around the mouth of the Mississippi River — have long sought more efficient and faster lock and dam projects along major rivers where goods flow. Projects like the Olmsted Locks and Dam have had long delays and cost overruns as the Corps deals with infrastructure that, in cases like Olmsted, should have been updated decades ago. The Corps has learned over the past three decades better means and methods to upgrade its network of locks and dams, such as sinking concrete monoliths for underwater construction and minimizing diving.
However, the Waterways Council notes that projects are still taking too long and even the use of Building Information Modeling and the Corps’ standardization of Autodesk design and Forma cloud services have not provided timelines for the reopening of locks and dams more quickly and better outcomes for goods traveling on river systems whose barges and ships can be slowed by slow sailing during long periods of construction.
River users also contribute to the construction of locks and dams on inland waterways through funding formulas for Corps projects and taxes and docking fees.
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Zea said the HDR study and other council research showed that “if you only have one or two projects going at a time, you can successfully fund those projects over a 3-5 year time frame. So how do you design racks and stacks so that when one project is done, you can go straight to building the next one? So really, managing it like a program.”
The Corps Design Center in Vicksburg, Mississippi, handles the design of all river projects, and there are executives in the Headquarters District in Washington, DC, who have responsibility for the overall construction of inland waterways. However, they also have responsibility for operations and maintenance, and work with contractors is often delegated to individual geographic districts where projects like the Montgomery and Kentucky Lock Additions are not connected to plan or share resources, such as the specialized batch plants the Corps creates for most of its lock and dam projects.
Rep. Craig was not immediately available for comment on the proposal, but a bipartisan group of representatives and senators has already studied the HDR board’s white paper and is considering the feasibility of introducing the new INCO organization as early as this year.
