Three years ago, Ed Williams didn’t like what he saw on the Mississippi.
Over three decades, Williams had worked his way up from watchman and deck hand to traffic manager at Upper River Services, which operates a barge, fleeting, and towing service in St. Paul. But now he was seeing fewer barges moving up and down the river. The number of days each year that Williams worked continued to decline. “It became seasonal work,” he recalls.
Today, Williams is the upper Gulf fleet manager for American Commercial Lines in Jeffersonville, Indiana. He handles the logistics for barges arriving and leaving the Louisiana ports of New Orleans and Baton Rouge. He puts in 84 hours during a two-week period, working 12-hour days for seven days straight. “Then I have seven days off,” he says. “It’s not a bad deal.”
Williams’s story is not that much different than the stories of the hundreds of production and administrative workers, river boat pilots, and deck hands who, over the past decade, have left the river port towns of Minneapolis, St. Paul, Hastings, Savage, and Shakopee. During that time, more and more domestic grain has been absorbed by ethanol plants. This means that greater quantities of grain are being shipped west by rail—and less by barge. Since grain has been the main product shipped on the river, the total volume of goods carried by barges on the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers has plummeted since 1999.
Over the decades, commercial navigation on the Upper Mississippi has ebbed and flowed, as one type of cargo disappears and another takes its place. But the current decline is particularly troublesome, because as of yet, there is no clear picture of what goods will carry river shipping into its next heyday, or whether there will even be one. The best bets appear to be distillers’ grains, a byproduct of ethanol used as livestock feed, and possibly shipping containers, but those are a ways off.
Industry analysts say that rivers will always be an efficient and important channel for transport. The challenge now for the Twin Cities region—particularly Minneapolis—is to find what it can profitably transport on the Mississippi.
Going With the Flow
In the mid-19th century, numerous steamboats plied the Mississippi, bringing grain and other products as well as passengers to and from St. Paul. By 1890, the steamboat industry was all but forgotten, and timber remained the only significant cargo on the river.
“Timber products dominated the upper river’s traffic from the 1890s to the first decade of the 20th century,” notes a 2003 report by the National Park Service and the St. Paul District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “Timber shipping, however, fell with the white pine forests of western Wisconsin and northern Minnesota.”
