Published: September 21, 2007 08:13 am      

Taking stock of locks: Army Corps shows off progress of river-traffic improvements

With a worldwide conference of marine-navigation experts in Louisville this week, David Klinstiver had an audience to show his decade-long project that is approaching its final year.

Since 2000, the Army Corps of Engineers has been renovating the McAlpine Locks and Dam to allow river traffic to pass more swiftly. The completion deadline for the $430 million project is March 2009, and a tour reveals signs that progress has been made — and that it can’t continue fast enough.

The main 1,200-foot-long lock is a gated chamber in which the water depth can be adjusted between upstream and downstream, allowing a convoy of 15 connected barges to enter from one side and emerge from the other 45 minutes later.

Locks have conducted river traffic since the early 1800s, when the sudden drop and rapids of the Falls of the Ohio were found to be impassable. The 1,200-foot lock sits alongside a 360-foot lock and 600-foot lock built previously.

In 1990, a study recommended demolishing the two shorter locks to allow construction of a second 1,200-foot chamber, which can fit an entire barge convoy that would take several hours to pass, separated, through a shorter lock. Klinstiver, the project’s resident engineer, said 18 to 20 of those 15-barge convoys pass through McAlpine on a typical day.

Two dozen representatives from the Smart Rivers Conference toured the construction site Wednesday morning — where a second 1,200-foot-long chamber is replacing the two shorter ones — as Army Corps officials touted river traffic as a cheaper, energy-efficient alternative to trucking. They noted that coal is the most frequent passenger of Ohio River barges.

Half of the $430 million price tag is to be reimbursed by the marine shipping industry, Klinstiver said.

The downside of removing the two shorter locks, Corps official Mike Ryan said, is that any malfunction of the lone operating lock shuts down river traffic. Two weeks of repairs in August 2004 cost the industry $9 million, a Corps report said.

The current lock’s downstream gates, framed in wood, had sprouted two leaks where they joined Wednesday morning. Once the new lock operates, the old gates will eventually be discarded in favor of premade ones currently sitting on site.

“We keep our fingers crossed that they’ll last until we have water coming through this new lock,” Klinstiver said.