The Mississippi Department of Transportation has awarded the Lowndes County Port a $692,714 grant to install infrastructure for barges to tie up while waiting to load and unload, according to Port Director Will Sanders.
The money comes from MDOT’s multimodal grant program, Sanders explained. It will nearly double the number of safe spots for barges to tie.
“We have pieces of equipment called dolphins that the barges tie up to,” Sanders said. “They’ve been hit and bumped for years, and we’ve got one that’s non-operational and has been knocked over.”
The port has five operational dolphins, Sanders explained, and when they are in use, barges that are waiting in line have to tie themselves to other barges or even to trees along the waterway.
“We have lots of overflow of barges, and we’ve run out of places to tie them up to,” Sanders said. “During high water or when it rains a lot, the current gets going and some of those barges tied off to trees get loose. The next thing you know, you’ve got a runaway barge.”
The grant money will go toward installing six monopiles for the barges, Sanders said.
“A monopile is one big pipe,” Sanders said. “They drill down into the rock to install it, and then they fill it with sand. They have them in Little Rock, Arkansas, and when I saw them I thought, ‘That’s what we need.’”
In addition to added safety, the monopiles will allow the port to serve more barges, Sanders said, with a “significant” economic impact.
Those extra barges could lead to more jobs at the port itself, as well as indirect jobs created with increased trucking and rail traffic to Steel Dynamics, Aluminum Dynamics and SDI Biocarbon, Sanders said.
In October Steel Dynamics announced a $2.5 billion project that would add a low-carbon flat-rolled aluminum mill near its steel mill off of Airport Road, and a biocarbon facility on Artesia Road near the International Paper pulp mill.
A groundbreaking was held in March, and the mill is expected to be complete by late 2025 and create around 700 jobs, and the biocarbon facility by late 2023 and create around 40 jobs.
The multimodal program is a yearly MDOT grant program, Sanders said.
“They get $10 million every year for multimodal awards, and $3.8 million of that is set aside for ports,” Sanders said. “There are 15 ports in the state, and 12 applied. The selection committee designated ours the No. 1 request this year.”
Lowndes County Board of Supervisors President Trip Hairston said the grant is good news for continued economic development.
“The port plays a really significant role in where we are with economic development and in supporting the industries that are already here,” Hairston said. “It gives us a competitive advantage over other places, and it is a great recruiting tool as well.”
SDI is currently interested in buying about 90 acres of land on the east bank of the port. SDI brings in scrap metal, pig iron and other materials for its mill near the Golden Triangle Regional Airport, and then ships metal coils to its customers by rail, truck and barge. If the purchase goes through, SDI could set up its own port operations with its own vendors.
Brian Jones is the local government reporter for Columbus and Lowndes County.
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