It’s been a quiet week along the Tombigbee River.
The familiar sight of barges moving up and down the waterway is strangely absent and the routine of loading and unloading at the Lowndes County Port has slowed to a trickle.
Flooding has the transportation industry coming and going, one could say.
“It’s been pretty slow,” port director Will Sanders said Tuesday. “But what’s really going to hurt is that it may be six weeks before it changes.”
The heavy flooding that started two weeks ago has created “choke points” both above and below Columbus that has idled the two major river transport companies — Logistics Services on the east bank of the Tombigbee and Westco on the west bank.
Flooding along the river in Coffeeville, Alabama, and Aberdeen have put barge traffic on hold.
The situation at Aberdeen is particularly bad.
“You can almost walk across the river south of the lock and dam and Aberdeen,” Sanders said. “There’s going to have to be a lot of dredging to get that stretch of the river back open to barge traffic, as much as six weeks.”
That’s particularly bad news for Logistics Services, which relies on traffic north of Columbus for much of its business — shipping steel from Steel Dynamics north on the river, while unloading materials headed south.
“For the month of March, I’ve already lost about 50,000 tons that I know of,” said Eddie Rushing, port manager for Logistics Solutions. “It’s probably going to get up to 100,000 tons in lost business if it stays like this for six weeks.”
The timing is particularly bad with spring approaching, Rushing said.
“We’ve already lost about 25,000 tons of limestone traffic here,” he said. “All of that comes from the north, and right now we desperately need limestone, which is used in road construction. With spring coming, there’s a great demand for the limestone at the resale yard here.”
For Rushing, the lost revenue for shipping Steel Dynamics products north is something that can’t be recouped.
“They’ll ship their product by truck or rails, so (Steel Dynamics) has other options,” he said. “But for us, what we lose we’ll never get back.”
On the west bank, the flood issues were more pronounced early, but will likely have a shorter long-term impact.
While the flooding didn’t escape the banks of the river on the east bank, it breached the west bank about a week ago.
“We had 30 inches of water on our docks,” said Watco port manager Jim Strawn. “Beginning that Friday, on Feb. 22, we were down for six days. We couldn’t do any work at all.”
Because Watco does more of its shipping to and from the river south of Columbus, the overall and long-term impact won’t be as heavy.
In a Tuesday briefing with the Corps of Engineers, Sanders said the choke-point at Coffeeville, which is about 100 miles north of Mobile, could be resolved within a week.
That will open up traffic between Mobile and Columbus, which Strawn said is a big part of his business.
“We’re still working,” Strawn said. “We have some barges between us and Demopolis that we hope to start working pretty soon. So we’ll have that until the Coffeeville situation is worked out.
“Most of our stuff comes from Mobile, so how fast we get back to normal will depend on when the water on the southern end of the river gets back to normal pool,” he added.
Strawn said on a typical month, his company handles about 50,000 tons of material.
“Coffeeville is supposed to crest today (Wednesday), so then it’s a matter of seeing how much shoaling there is and how much dredging they’ll have to do,” Strawn said. ” Hopefully, it will be back to normal pretty soon.”
Westco handles about 90 percent of the scrap metal shipped up the river to Columbus and SDI while Logistics Services handle the bulk of river transport of finished steel product, which is shipped north.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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