Great Lakes Water Levels Now Below Historic Avg. For 14 Years; 1 Inch Loss Cuts 250+ Tons In Freight
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In the Dorothy Ann pilothouse, 70 feet above the water, the sudden appearance of dashes on the screen was a moment of tight shoulders and held breath. The boat had already been lightened by dropping off thousands of tons of cargo earlier in its journey to float at this depth, and the boat glided the last few hundred feet over the soft bottom. A large laker, 1,000 feet long, will lose 250 to 270 tons for every inch the water level drops, Mr. Nekvasil said. That can add up to 324,000 tons a season per boat, he said.
The impact does not stop with shippers. “The aggregate impact over time will be to raise the cost of commodities, which in turn will raise the price of manufacturing goods, which in turn raises the price to the consumer,” said Richard D. Stewart, the director of the Transportation and Logistics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Superior.
The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that inadequate harbor maintenance increased the cost of traded products by $7 billion in 2010 and that this cost would increase to $14 billion by 2040 if the work was not stepped up.
The most recent causes of low water were the mild winters in 2011 and 2012, which left too little snow to feed the lakes, traditionally “the largest source of water to the Great Lakes,” Mr. Kompoltowicz of the corps said. Last spring, the water level rose just 4 inches instead of the usual 12 in Michigan and Huron, he said, and that was followed by an unusually dry summer and above-average evaporation in the fall — 12 inches more than average. The water level currently stands at 577.20 feet, 22 inches below the long-term average.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/us/great-lakes-shipping-suffers-as-water-levels-fall.html?_r=0
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