LITTLE ROCK — Starting Saturday, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will close the McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System lock near the Mississippi River for three weeks of repair, the longest shutdown in memory for long-distance shipping on the river navigation system, Corps officials say.

News of the closure of the Montgomery Point Lock and Dam, the farthest eastern lock on the Arkansas River system, has sent many river shippers scrambling.

“You shut down the river for three weeks, and that’s a really big deal,” said Duane Hawkins, assistant general manager for Logistic Services Inc., the Port of Little Rock’s cargo-handling operator. “There is a big-time rush on right now, people trying to get their barges off the river or onto the river” before midnight Friday.

The problem at the remote Montgomery Point lock involves a bad hinge on two of the lock gates that open and close to admit river traffic, said James McKinnie, acting chief of the Corps’ navigation and maintenance section for the Little Rock District. The lock actually is on the White River, which is used for the last few miles of the navigation system before its confluence with the Mississippi River.

The estimated repair cost is $1.5 million, Corps spokesman Laurie Driver said.

Corps officials note that the lock closure won’t stop all river traffic — only barges and boats originating from or destined for the Mississippi River.

However, cutting off commercial shippers and potentially thousands of tons of cargo from the nation’s central river artery is a blow, shippers say.

“It’s put a huge wrinkle in everybody’s situation,” said Steve Taylor, president of Johnston’s Port 33 of Enid, Okla., which operates two ports in Oklahoma, two in New Orleans and one in West Virginia.

Shipments of crude oil in Oklahoma, for example, are going to ports for storage, then shipping out to the Mississippi River and beyond, he said.

“We’re probably loading four tows a week, maybe more of crude oil,” Taylor said.

“Those trucks are coming [to the loading facility] whether the river is open or not. Your choices are to stand still with the cargo, or transfer to truck or rail,” he said.

Shifting to truck or rail is more expensive. “I can’t fathom the dollars,” he said. “I don’t know that anyone has figured out the dollar impact.”

In 2011, about 10.6 million tons of commodities were shipped by barge on the 445-mile river system from the Port of Catoosa near Tulsa to the Mississippi River, according to Corps data. More than three-fourths of that involved transportation on the Mississippi River.

Only about 22 percent, or 2.3 million tons, were shipped internally, meaning those commodities never left the McClellan-Kerr system.

Lock closures aren’t unknown on the Arkansas River. The Corps closes a couple of the McClellan-Kerr system’s 18 locks each year for routine maintenance, said shippers and Corps officials. Those stoppages are planned as much as a year in advance to have as little impact as possible on shipping. The Corps has also been successful in whittling the time needed for the work, from two weeks in the past to as little as a weeklong shutdown recently, Driver said.

But the gate hinge repair for Montgomery Point is not routine, McKinnie said. And shippers received just a few weeks’ notice.

“The Corps has worked well with shippers” on the problem, said Dennis Oakley, president of Bruce Oakley Inc. of North Little Rock, a river terminal shipping company. “But it’s going to delay shipments. And we’ll have boats and barges sitting and not doing anything.”

The lock repair was originally scheduled for Monday. That was terrible news for Dave Delie, president of Welspun Tubular LLC in Little Rock. His company, which buys steel coils and manufactures pipe for the oil and gas industry, had 10-15 barges on the way to the plant, carrying much-needed coil. Those barges weren’t going to make it to the Montgomery Lock before that closure date.

“The Corps moved the date to December 1, which was helpful,” Delie said. “I think now we’ll be in pretty good shape.”

Montgomery Point, completed in 2004, is the newest lock on the McClellan-Kerr navigation system. Its cost was pegged at $262 million that year, or more than $310 million in today’s dollars.

It’s the only lock and dam in the system that’s designed with a navigation passage around the lock, which allows river traffic to bypass a time-consuming trip through the lock gates if water levels are high enough. Through months of drought this summer and fall, however, the alternate navigation passage hasn’t been usable. Corps officials had hoped for enough heavy rainfall in the upper Midwest to raise the Mississippi River levels during the repair. If boats and barges could have used the navigation passage around the lock, “the repair would have had no impact,” Driver said.

Steve Brewer, the Corps’ hydraulic engineer for the Little Rock District, said Wednesday that it would take a heavy rain in the upper Midwest — perhaps more than 6 inches — to raise water levels high enough to keep the Montgomery Point lock open during the gate repair. No such rain is forecast, he said.

“Chances are very slim we’ll get enough rainfall to open the navigation passage before the repair work is complete,” he said. “Of course, you never know.”

The Montgomery Point lock repair comes at a time when shippers are expressing concerns about a Corps proposal to shut all locks on the McClellan-Kerr system for four hours each day for routine maintenance.

The agency started the closures Oct. 1 at five locks in western Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma. Officials plan to decide by the end of the year whether to begin similar fourhour shutdowns in the river system’s 13 remaining locks.

The proposal also would restrict recreational watercraft to two periods of lock passage each day.

Corps officials say the maintenance is needed to extend the life of aging locks, especially as federal funding declines.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 11/29/2012