GRANITE CITY, Ill. — Crews scrambled to make repairs Wednesday near the busiest lock on a vital Mississippi River commerce corridor near St. Louis as hundreds of barges and tugboats remained snarled in a backlog that was growing worse by the hour.
Workers closed Lock 27 last Saturday after discovering that a protection cell — a rock-filled steel cylinder against which barges rub to help align them for proper entry into the lock — had split open, spilling enough of the rock into the river to obstruct passage.
That damage was on an unarmored section of the cell that the barges don’t typically make contact with because the cylinders are often 15 to 20 feet under water. However, that portion has been exposed because the river’s level has been lowered dramatically by the nation’s drought, said Mike Petersen, an Army Corps of Engineers spokesman.
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The lingering drought also has made the Mississippi narrower, leaving towboat pilots struggling to find a safe place to park their barges as they wait out the repairs. Petersen said the work could be completed as early as Thursday.
As of Wednesday morning, nearly five dozen tugboats and more than 400 barges — carrying enough cargo to fill 2,400 railcars or 23,600 large tractor-trailers — were caught up in the logjam, a Coast Guard spokesman in St. Louis said.
The number of vessels forced to park there spiked by one-third over the preceding 24 hours, while there was a doubling of the number of barges, hauling everything from grains to coal, fertilizer, and construction materials, Lieutenant Colin Fogarty said.
Roughly half of the nation’s farm exports passes through that lock, now closed at a time growers throughout the Midwest are harvesting their corn and soybeans, Petersen said.