The Mighty Mississippi Is Backed Up

Gulf of Mexico. Walt Whitman celebrated it in verse. Huckleberry Finn saw it freedom on its waters, and today it still has some of that romance from any people, including Captain Ee Michael Bob. He's the Mississippi River pilot you heard at the very top. But as Captain Bob can tell you, the romantic Mississippi is also one of America's

most critical routes for commerce. Always has been more than a trillion pounds of goods traveled down the river each year, or it did until water levels and key parts of the river dropped by a lot this year. That stops some ships cold, and the river is now backed up with billions of dollars of corn and wheat, fertilizer, steel, waiting for water levels to rise again. So what happens when the most important river in the world's largest economy can't keep a boat afloat. One person who knows the

answer to that question is my colleague, Michael Hurtzer. He's an agricultural reporter for Bloomberg and Chicago, and he and several colleagues have written a big story about the Mississippi River. Michael, in your store, you're right that water levels on the Mississippi are way down. Why is that? Ext dream Drought across the entire country and in parts of North America at large, have really dwindled the water levels in the

Mississippi to the lowest in a decade or more. And it's kind of coming at the worst time of year for farmers who are dependent on the river to float their supplies down to the Gulf of Mexico. And waters are so thin and dry in places that barges and boats just simply cannot pass by without getting stuck. It's sort of a problem that there's not really a lot

of easy solutions other than praying for rain. You know, a lot of us think about the Mississippi River as being this great American river, but we don't always think about it as a major waterway for the transportation of goods of all kinds around the country. Yeah. I mean a lot of you know, grain comes down the river and then stuff like metal and fertilizer and chemicals come up the river. It's a very symbiotic, efficient supply chain that has really helped make you know, US industry a

global powerhouse. Oftentimes, we we don't hear about it because it runs extremely smoothly. It's really when there's problems, and there's usually either low waters or high waters, and that's when we start to hear about it. If there is a problem, Mike, he said, a lot goes down the river, but I kind of want to give a sense of just how much does travel down the Mississippi, and estimated of all US freights is dependent on the river upwards or downwards to to get to where it needs to go.

So it's you know, quite literally the lifeblood for the center of the country. And what kind of goods are moving down the river corn, soybeans, fertilizer, metal coming up, chemicals, road salt, fracking, sand, materials to make concrete, lots of petroleum products. So it's sort of like the entirety of the US infrastructure is coming down to Mississippi every year. You said that this is happening at the worst time of the year for it to happen. Why is this

time of year so especially bad. So, you know, farmers in the northern hemisphere are are harvesting crops that they planted in the spring. Even if you're sort of driving around the Midwest, you might start to see corn just piling up in a just a giant mountain of corn, and they need to move their supplies onto the world market or else. The risk is prices will start to

really drop. If you can't fit enough in your grain bin on the farm, you have to either you can store it outside for a little while, but you really don't want to store it outside for for long or it could go bad. What are the alternatives? Can they just simply divert it to trains or trucks or some other means. Yeah, So, like you know, right now, it's like the peak demand for freight, So a lot of the trucks and trains and barges were already lined up

or spoken for at this time of year. So yes, there's plenty of alterna atives, but the cost is going to be where it hits you. You know, your large shipping prices on the river are like, you know, more than double the previous record. There's alternatives, but it's going to really cost you an armor a leg. So is this just what the Mississippi is going to be like now? Or if we have wet winter, rainy spring, will it fill back up and all will be well? So we

can hope that the rains will come. For instance, in the Ohio river side that that part of the country and the mid South rarely stays in drought for long, but changing climate the experts tell us that there's just more volatility in the climate and droughts are getting a little bit more severe and longer. There's all happening at the same time that grain prices are high because of

scarcity caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. How do you think that that is going to affect grain prices in the US given the challenges that we're talking about here. It's so high prices are are a signal to farmers across the world to continue planting, to to be able to try to capture some of the those high prices, and we should see farmers in many parts of the country planting more, which will have the effect of helping

to cure those high prices. We will see markets start to change where farmers in the US will have more competition and global markets because everyone's gonna want to plant grain to capture those high prices exactly. Like, for instance, Brazil is one of the main areas there where they're planting a lot more corn and a lot more soy beans, and they're also putting a lot more money into their infrastructure.

So Brazil is sort of stealing the march of the U. S. Farmer a little bit by being more competitive into the world market. While we've got some problems here, what does the knock on effective having slow passage down this important river. Basically, we think of the U. S. Farmers like their window on their harvest season is closing, you know, very quickly.

If you had some of these deals had been signed months ago, and now that they're having trouble kind of getting the shipments moving, maybe your second guessing or you're looking for another alternative so that the new deals will be just they won't happen, or they'll go to someone else because it's either too costly or it'll take too long to get Mike hurts are, thanks so much for talking to me today. Thank you so much. After the break, we'll hear what it's like to actually work on the river.

Right now, I'm joined by Captain E. Michael bop. He is the president of the Crescent Riverport Pilot Association and he is on the line from Medite, Louisiana. Captain, thanks for taking the time. Thank you. And it's gonna sound like a ridiculous question to you, but to our listeners, um, what is a river pilot? What is the job of a river pilot? A river pilot is basically a person that has extensive knowledge of the river. And so we're the Crescent River Pilots are one of three groups that

operate on the Mississippi River. We navigate or facilitate the navigation of foreign deep draft vassels because you know, a foreign ship comes in and they have never been to the Mississippi River, has no idea how it works, has no idea about language on the river or the different Because it's a dynamic river, it is one of the most difficult bodies of order to navigate in North America, and she changes. She has seasons just like everything else,

and you have to know that. So the river pilots have the expertise to bring the ship with the captain and facilitate the navigation. And we go from the head of the pass which is below Vellas Jump and Pilottown all the way to New Orleans, which is a hundred and five miles the Crescent. Pilots in some years we'll do seventeen thousand movements, so we're moving a lot of ships. So you're guiding these enormous ships and helping them to navigate this river. Right, So how we get on the

ship is underway. We get on a crew boat and we matched the speed of the ship. We climb a Jacob's ladder while it's moving. What is it Jacob's ladder. It's a rope ladder on the side of the ship. So we do that every day. We do that over

seventeen thousand times a year. So you're climbing up from the pilot's vessel upper rope ladder onto these enormous ships so that you can then speak to the captain and crew and give them instructions, right, we go up and between the master of the ship, the captain and the pilot, we safely navigate the ship and we have a ninety nine point nine percent safety and that does not happen

by accident. That that happens by long term you know experience, and I can tell you the hundred and twenty pilots that I work alongside of some of the best ship anglers in the world. So, and we have a state commission to do this, and our responsibility is to keep the vessels safe so we can keep a twenty four hour cargo movement and not stop the river from operating. So that's basically what we do. That's the best explanation of what a pilot actually does. That's what we do.

How large are the largest ships that are coming up and down in Mississippi. Some of them are twelve hundred feet so they're over three football team so it is, and they're they're over a hundred and seventy tons one barge. The cargo that is in one barge takes the place of seventy tractor trailers. On the corner road. There's big eighteen wheelers that are always the wheel at seventy of them. So if you had you took one toe with fifteen barges,

that is actually taking over one thousand trucks cross the road. Well, we are talking all about the Mississippi River today, and you know we've heard from people who are talking about its effect on commerce, the low water on the ecosystem. And what I wanted to do is talk to you. What are you experiencing? What are you seeing when you are on the water, Well from the river pilots standpoint and the lower part of the Mississippi River where we

handle all fall and deep draft vessels. And when you say a deep draft vessel, exactly what is that for people who aren't familiar kind of like me. So shipping a ship a vessel, you know, whether it's a cruise ship or it's the tank or a deep draft vessel, is the distance between the water and the bottom of the ship. The only place you could go in a deep draft vessel is from the sea buoy and the Gulf of Back Mexico at southwest past it starts to

get more shallow. So as far as the effect on the deep draft vessel below Baton Rouge, we're not physically affected it's not physically affecting our depth. We're not bumping the bottom or anything like that. The effect is above Baton Rouge and in the northern part of the country where the barges are losing water level and the barges are not getting down here, it's because of that bottleneck up above. It's slowing everything down when those burges would

usually come your way. Yeah, So what happens specifically in bulk like corn, soybeans, rice, it has grown in the upper River of the America, It is put in a silo, and then from a silo it goes into a barge, and then the barge comes down river. It's stages below Baton Rouge, and then it goes to a grain elevator, and once it gets the grain elevator, it goes into holes of ships and then it goes forward. And that is the logistics of how it all works, and that

it's affecting us in inventory. We're not getting our inventory in grain and soybeans right now. You know, October should have been a boom month and it's somewhat flat in the grain market. So that that's how it's affecting us. A barge is normally about ten feet deep below ten feet of draft, and that that is how they load the cargo. They load the cargo in an empty container, which is a barge. It gets lower and lower the more cargo you put. Usually of a barge will be

ten feet deep. Well, they're running renting the ground and it's bottle necking where the barge is behind them can't go anywhere because the ones out of them are a ground. So right now there's an excess of about barges that are bottleneck above Baton Rouge and they can't get down here. Now is that essentially just a long line of burdges that are in a traffic jam that we will not move, and they actually stuck there. They're probably in different parts

of the river. And what happens when you load something to ten feet and you only have eight and a half feet of water, you're gonna hit the bottom and that they're not really a ground. They just can't go any further because our water adapt its following. We move fifty feet draft ships and we're not effected at all in that respect. Just the cargo is not getting dawnly and that's the problem. But you know Mississippi River, she's got seasoned, and it changes all the time. It's it's

either booming high or flow. This is fairly and abnormal low. It's lower than normal. So that's what's affecting the barges. We move of the grain that has grown in United States out of the Mississippi River. So it's not just important to the country, it's an important to the world.

Or we feed the world out of the Mississippi River now and we've been talking a lot about what's happening up north from you, but with that bottleneck, with less of those goods coming down river, what are you and the pilots in your association kind of doing these days? What does your day look like? Oh, we're we're a very diverse port. When you take from the sea buoy to Baton Rouge and you combine all the ports, it is the largest port in the world. We're very diverse

in cargo. Thank god, we moved tankers full of oil l G LPG that's liquid natural gas, and yeah, yeah, we we we move a diverse amount of cargoes. Now, grain is a bread and butter, so we're moving to the cargo. We moved cruise ships. Every week we move over one point two million passengers a year and cruise ships. So thank god we're diverse and we have a lot, a lot of stuff move other than grain. Talking about how you expected this October would be a big boom

month didn't happen. Are you now expecting that if the water does rise, that you are just going to be inundated with all of these barges coming to deliver what they couldn't deliver for so long face the famine. Yes, I do. I anticipate that cargo is coming. I anticipate being very busy and long, long nights, and as soon as one grain ship gets filled, another one's going to go right in. And then there's a couple of other

chips that are waiting for grain right now. And it won't be like a waterfall, but it'll be a steady flow, and and that cargo is not lost, That cargo will be going to places where it needs ago, and we will become very, very inundated with business. Yes, what do you see in the future. Do you think that these sorts of feast and famine cycles they see describe it are going to become more frequent or is this just

a one off? You know, every year you have a low river and it usually happens at this time of year, and the river has been here for million years of years, right, So, and I've worked on a river for forty two years. I've seen lower river and uh, you know, I think that the world depends on what comes out of the Mississippi River. That's what I think, Captain Bout, Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me. Thank you.

When we return, is the water coming back or is this just a new normal for the Mississippi and other rivers like it. I'm here with Clint Wilson, the director of the Louisiana State University Center for River Studies. So, Clint, can I ask you this? So you actually have like a working model of the river and you're actually running water through this model, and by doing that you can

actually see what the actual river is doing. Yes, we reproduced the flows, you know, at a smaller scale, but we reproduced the flows in our model river again based on you know, the flows in the real river. We have the bathymetry, we have the levees, we have the meander bends, we have everything in our model river that the real Mississippi River has, as well as these plastic particles that move in our river, the way sand moves down the Mississippi River, and so we're able to replicate

the flows, We're able to replicate the river stages. We're able to study how sea level rise in the future is going to impact the way the river hydraulics work, the water levels too, flows, how the sediment, how that's going to impact the way sand moves. You know, what we're really looking at it and helping the state understand

is how that sand moves down the river. So it's really important because the United States Army Corps of Engineer spends well over a hundred million dollars a year dredging sand out of the Mississippi River to keep it deep enough for the ocean going vessels to get in and out of the Mississippi River. So imagine you spent a lot of time not just looking at the model, but actually looking at the actual river. When you go out and you look at the river, what do you see today? Well, oftentimes,

you know, large sand bars are exposed. You know, hundreds of feet of sand, you know, thousands of feet up and down the river just exposed to the air. Now that normally would be covered by the water at this time of year. You also just see in some places, you know, how steep the river gets, very dramatically depending on where you are in the river. So many people will go out and look at the river, you know, when it's in flood stage. You know, Oh, they're fascinated

by the high water. They're fascinated by how fast the water is flowing, how much water is flowing and what that means, and the ships and the tankers are up

so high. But you know, I think a lot of people are seeing the river now in a different state that they normally just don't think about and they don't appreciate, you know, how much work and effort from the army, corps of engineers and others goes into maintaining that river so that we can have ports, we can have communities, we can have facilities along the river, and those ships and barges can get up in them down the river reliably. Is what we're seeing now, just part of that normal

kind of boom and bus cycling for the river. Are we seeing something different here? We're seeing something a little bit different in most of the river now here in Louisiana, the Mississippi River that flows through Louisiana. We see these river flows and these river levels about every ten or

twelve years. And that's because that's right, yes, And that's because you know, you think about all the different parts of the Mississippi River watershed that contribute to the flow that's coming down through Louisiana and out in the Gulf

of Mexico. You know, whether it's the Ohio River, the Upper Mississippi River, the Missouri, the Arkansas, the Tennessee, right, and so in a normal fall, you know, one or two of those watersheds, those rivers may be low, but you know, several weathers, a couple of weathers are at their normal fall flows, and so you know, overall the Mississippi River watershed really isn't low. What we're seeing this year, though, is all of the rivers that are contributing in the

Mississippi River are low. We see, you know, these kind of critical or this I'm gonna say crisis conditions right in different parts of the watershed that we normally don't see all at the same time. Maybe that's the best way to say it. And is this because we're just going through a normal drought season, or is this a larger change having to do with climate. My guess is we're going to see that this is the type of

event that's probably or the confluence of events. Right. When I say that, confluence events meaning it's going to be dry in the Ohio basin perhaps at the same time

as it is in the Upper Mississippi as the Missouri. Right, those are the kind of things that probably will be happening, you know, more often, or there's a higher probability of those happening at the same time, and we need to be thinking about how we can manage the Mississippi River, you know, since that's the topic of today's show, right, you know, we need to be thinking about Okay, so what does that mean if we start to see these type of event and so these type of conditions happen

more frequently, what is it we can do in the future to mitigate against that? What are some of the things that can be done to mitigate these effects? I think the first thing we have to acknowledge is that Mother Nature holds the spicket, right, So so the first thing is, you know, there's not a whole lot we can do in terms of the rainfall, the precipitation to

snow et cetera. However, we could potentially and again I'm not suggesting this is the path forward, but the Tennessee Valley Authority manages a number of reservoirs along the Tennessee River and in that basin, well, those are primarily used for prey hydroelectric power generation as well as flood control. The Missouri Basin has the Missouri River has a number

of dams and reservoirs for flood control. So one of the things we might be doing is not just thinking about how do they, how are they used, how effective are they in control and reducing the flood risk, but how might we be able to or how might we have to use those to maintain minimal flows in the Mississippi River, to keep the navigation up and down the river right, the commerce moving. Most of the engineering having to do the Mississippi River is trying to contain it.

Whereas now you're talking about things to do the opposite. Well, that's exactly right, and that's why that's another piece to this. You know, you understanding that there's economic hardship with the grains sitting in you know, in facilities up in the Midwest not being able to get out, but I think this type of event does help make us think about, Okay, yeah,

you're right. The Army Corps of Engineers has a plan in place if all the rivers contributing into the Mississippi are at their own flood state, is what if they were all in flood at the same time. And so I think this type of event makes us think about, Okay, the other extreme, right, and what can you do? And I think one of the other strategies would be, you know, maybe if we can't get more water into the river, there might need to be more funding or some more

innovative ways to keep the navigation channel open. And that might just be, hey, we need to make sure they're consistent funding for the Army Corps of Engineers to go in and dredge the navigation channel deep enough and wide enough so that even when we get these extremely low water levels, that the barges can still travel up and down like they normally do. What's the environmental impact of

having such low water levels on the river. So when we think about the habitat and the ecology or along river banks, along rivers, you know, any one particular year typically doesn't have a dramatic effect. And what about drinking water. So the bottom of the Mississippi River is in a minimum fifty feet below sea level. It's not in a lot of places deeper than that, and so the denser salt water from the Gulf of Mexico wants to move,

you know, basically inland. But what happens is typically is the Mississippi River's flowing enough where it can keep that saltwater out. Well, when these low flow years, that saltwater starts to move up the bottom of the river. And when you start to get to places like Plaquemins Parish, which is the parish in the lower most Mississippi River, it's right at basically the mouth of the river. There's industry, There are communities there that rely upon the Mississippi River

for their drinking water. The City of New Orleans relies upon the Mississippi River for their drinking water, and a lot of other industries along the lowermost river. None of those facilities or communities water treatment plants are set up to handle saline water. They just don't have that in their standard operating procedure, in their design, or within their equipment.

And so what's having to happen is Blackman's parish has had to go out and procure desalinization equipment so that they can in essence, pre treat the Mississippi River water before they put it into their drinking water system. Do you first see a time when all the dredging and other engineering feats just won't be up to it, and the river will no longer be able to transport goods and be the same Mississippi River that we see now. We need to have the Mississippi River connected to the

Gulf of Mexico. Now, what we might see twenty years from now in terms of what the lower most Missisippi River looks like may be different, but we're still going to have to have infrastructure. We're gonna have to dredge, We're gonna have to do things to make sure that the navigation that commerce can move up and in and out of the river reliably. Clint Wilson, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me. Thank you for having me. Thanks everyone who came on the show today.

You can read the Big Take story on the Mississippi that Michael hurts Wu wrote with several colleagues on Bloomberg dot Com. Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take, the daily podcast from Bloomberg and I Heart Radio. For more shows from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. Read Today's story and subscribe to our daily newsletter at Bloomberg dot com. Slash Big Take, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us with questions or comments to Big

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