When speaking about the changes to the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway as a result of this year’s extreme flooding, Mitch Mays showed a photograph of a colleague standing ankle-deep in water surrounded by damp sediment.
“He should be underwater, but he’s not,” said Mays, the Tenn-Tom Waterway administrator, who spoke to Columbus Rotary Club at Lion Hills Center on Tuesday. “The flooding pushed so much sediment out from waters that feed into the (waterway), and so much water into the locks and dams that we had to dredge it out. We probably won’t be back to normal until this November.”
Since the flooding last February, the United States Army Corps of Engineers have been going up and down the waterway, removing hundreds of tons of silt — fine sand, clay, or other material carried by running water and deposited as a sediment — and taking it to offshore sites specifically designed for this eventuality. One of the worst areas, near Aberdeen, had more than 400 tons of excess sediment that needed to be removed.
“We designated different spots along the waterway where we could put the sediment once we remove it,” Mays said. “But we haven’t had to use some of them until now.”
Until the excess silt is removed, parts of the waterway are impassable, either because the silt is so thick barges cannot get through, or because the amount of sediment is so great that it puts the depth of the waterway at less than 300 feet, the minimum depth allowed by the Army Corps of Engineers, or narrows sections to less than 9 feet wide, the minimum width of the waterway, Mays said.
Barges using the Tenn-Tom Waterway carry about 6 million tons of goods yearly, a number that hasn’t wavered much year-to-year until 2019. Mays said he estimates a “significant drop-off” in the amount of tonnage ferried up and down the waterway.
“That’s because of all the flooding we’ve had,” he said. “That shut us down for a good couple months, and there are still some parts we have to dredge to get it back to 300 feet deep or 9 feet wide.”
Mays did not feel comfortable estimating the financial toll the closure of the Tenn-Tom Waterway or the flooding has taken. He told Rotarians one of his biggest concerns is industries that used the waterway to move goods and products will not return to using the waterway after it is back to full operating capacity.
“We do worry about businesses and industry not returning, primarily because of these incidents,” he said. “The waterway reduces wear and tear on roads from trucks and gives the capacity to transport larger loads and is better for the environment, but when we shut down, the companies were kind of forced to look at other models of transportation. We do have a fear they won’t return to the waterway because, out of necessity, they had to transfer out.”
However, Mays said, this kind of flooding is the exception, not the rule. As a whole, despite the current situation, the Tenn-Tom Waterway is doing exactly what it was intended to do: provide a path for commerce from Kentucky to the Alabama coast.
“We hear things about how, you know, this is a cash cow or it’s wasted tax dollars, and if that’s your opinion, that’s fine,” Mays said. “But it’s doing what it’s designed to do. It’s seen so much traffic. It’s created more than 24,000 jobs and generated millions in revenue. … There will be a dip in that this year, but the waterway is still doing what it was made for.”
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