The nasty winter is definitely taking a toll on Great Lakes and inland river traffic.
“What it’s taken for one boat to do, we’re having to put two boats out there to do the same thing,” Terry Hoeckendorff, vice president of operations for Calumet River Fleeting Inc., Chicago, said this week. “We haven’t had this kind of winter here in 20 years.”
That two decade mark is significant on several fronts. The late Capt. John Selvick founded the company in the spring of 1994, just as that tough winter was ending. “We never got a taste of it then,” Hoeckendorff said. In past winters, they had maybe two weeks of hard ice, and this year they’ve already had six weeks worth.
And the winter of 1994 was the standout year when four of the five lakes – all but Ontario – were 90 percent or more ice covered. “This year, that almost happened again,” said George Leshkevich, physical scientist at NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, Ann Arbor, Mich., but Lake Michigan was only 82 percent. Ontario was 43 percent.
Nevertheless, on Feb. 12 and 13, the lakes averaged an 88 percent ice cover, but as of Monday (2/24) that number had dropped to about 62 percent thanks to slightly warmer temps, winds and rain, Leshkevich said. Another frigid blast, however, could stabilize and possibly increase the ice.
The 40-year average cover for the Great Lakes is about 51 percent, and the average for February is 32 percent.
The U.S. Coast Guard started breaking ice Dec. 5, earlier than the 20-week season that usually runs from mid-December to mid-April. Through Jan. 20, the service had spent 3,800 hours icebreaking on the western lakes — an amount they normally log over an entire season, said Mark Gill, director of vessel traffic service based in Sault Ste. Marie, Mich. A normal three-day trip from Duluth, Minn., to Indiana Harbor is taking nine days, he said.
The Coast Guard has nine icebreaking vessels in the lakes — including six 140' icebreaking tugs — and gets an assist from two Canadian vessels. This year they’ve asked for more help from the Canadian fleet.
“The spring’s going to be a challenge,” Gill said. “We’re going to be colder than average.”
Conditions have been rough in the river system as well with ice slowing barge movements, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Feb. 20 Grain Transportation Report.
Illinois River grain movements for the first seven weeks of the year were 968,000 tons, 31 percent lower than the 3-year average, USDA said. However, Ohio River grain movements were 2.5 million tons, 41 percent higher than the 3-year average.
Traffic also is delayed at the rock-removal site on the Mississippi River near Thebes, Ill., where maximum tow sizes have been reduced. This is a continuation of an earlier project prompted by the drought to clear the hazardous rocks obstructing a 9' navigation channel between miles 46 and 38 near Thebes, south of St. Louis. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it expects to remove about 2,800 cu. yds. of rock.
For more data on the Great Lakes ice cover, see: http://www.glerl.noaa.gov/data/pgs/ice.html
