Mississippi River south of Memphis, August 2012. Photo: NASA
A drought that has led to in the Mississippi River and its tributaries has become a costly nuisance to and in parts of the Midwest.
The has caused the river to flow at its . Flooding of the river in 2011 led to an of silt in some sections, which now require additional dredging. Shippers have been told to on barges to allow the containers to float higher and decrease the chances for running aground.
An area of the river south of Memphis, Tennessee, shown in the satellite images above, is several inches below 2011 levels. The loss of just one inch in draft means a barge should carry than it normally would, a costly reality for shippers who already have to run fewer barges at a slower pace. A paper published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in 1989 estimated that barge companies because of low-water conditions in 1988.
The New York Times recently published a couple of articles how the decreased flow has led to more dredging, adjustments to barge payloads, , and at least one cancellation of a trip by the American Queen, a paddle-wheel steamboat. , a newspaper covering Eastern Iowa, reported that low river levels have reduced canoe and tube rentals in some Mississippi tributaries, like the Wapsinicon River and Maquoketa River. Some businesses have stopped renting watercrafts entirely because of the decreased flow.
“Upstream, I’m done,” Cindy Borst, proprietor of Lou Lou’s Landing in Olin, Iowa, told . “There’s a mile-long stretch so shallow you have to pull your canoe.”
People looking to give a positive recreational spin to the low flow might point to the increase in midriver sandbars for sunbathing and football, but they should be careful. In the low-river conditions of 1988, there were blamed on weak, deceptive sandbars.
“If it's really wet sand and there's flowing water underneath it, that's
what quicksand is,” Steve Barry of the Army Corps of Engineers told the . “The other issue is that as the river
flows by it undercuts. You think you're on a sandbar but you're
basically on a ledge. You put enough weight on it and you end up in the
river.”
—Joe Spring