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Troubles Travel Upstream
Frank Walsh, a soybean and corn farmer near Elwood, Ill., walks to the top of his grain bin, which is still half full from last year's crop.
(By Michael R. Schmidt For The Washington Post)
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Until they do, vessels sit, keeping shipments of crude at bay. Tankers will get priority to move down the river when they are ready.
The river pilots steer the vessels through the waters and have been gathering to figure out ways to keep their river running. They are staying in temporary quarters on the water on the Boax, a crane barge docked up from the mouth of the river. Pilottown in Plaquemines Parish, where they used to live, was demolished. Ten pilots are stationed for two weeks a time on the barge. Others are flying in and out on helicopters.
In the Port of Greater Baton Rouge yesterday, a 25,000-ton cargo vessel half filled with a rubber shipment sat at the dock being unloaded. Towering 45-ton cranes lifted pallets onto forklifts that carried them into a warehouse.
Baton Rouge was Plan B. When Katrina hit, the Pac Alkaid had unloaded half of its shipment at New Orleans, and the ship and its crew had to wait out the storm.
Soon after the Mississippi waterways reopened Saturday, the ship took off for the Baton Rouge port, which survived with little damage and is expected to be the port for many ships that would have been headed to New Orleans.
"We didn't want to waste any time," said Terry Gros, manager of P&O Ports, a company that loads and unloads ships at Baton Rouge. The ship traveled 130 miles, making the trip from New Orleans in about 10 hours.
The ship that brought the rubber came from Phuket, Thailand, the scene of last year's tsunami.
Perched several stories above the rubber being unloaded, ship captain Manuel Furio pointed to a red digital recorder on a bank of controls. On it, he had recorded the wind gusts as he rode out Katrina, and he proudly showed it to a visitor: 110 knots. That's 126 mph.
The river outside was calm now.
From the Farm
The river "is the most important pipeline for grain exports we have in this country," said Dale Durchholz, senior market analyst for the Illinois Farm Bureau. "From a transportation standpoint, it's the most developed and also the cheapest way for us to get grain from the interior of the country to the Gulf." To carry one barge worth of grain would take 15 rail cars and about 60 trucks.
"It takes a long time for water to run down the river, but price signals to farmers conducted up the river are made almost instantly," said Dennis Vercler, spokesman for the Illinois Farm Bureau. That is particularly troublesome this year because the Illinois farmers who rely most heavily on the river were also the hardest hit by this summer's drought.
The Walsh family and others acknowledged that they are far from desperate, especially compared with the homeless victims of the hurricane. They remain optimistic that the Mississippi will be cleared when the harvest rolls around in two weeks and will return to near-normal levels by the time they need it, driving crop prices back up. In the meantime, they worry about the impact of the hurricane on the cost of fuel and fertilizer.
