Arkansas River commerce up

Clog downstream on Mississippi hasn’t hurt state’s ports

A yellow material handling excavator scoops corn out of a barge and dumps it into a cute that leads to a railroad car at the Five Rivers Distribution Intermodal Facility on Sept. 7 in Van Buren. The port on the Arkansas River has seen a slight slowdown in activity because barge traffic was halted briefly due to low levels on the Mississippi River near Greenville, Miss.
A yellow material handling excavator scoops corn out of a barge and dumps it into a cute that leads to a railroad car at the Five Rivers Distribution Intermodal Facility on Sept. 7 in Van Buren. The port on the Arkansas River has seen a slight slowdown in activity because barge traffic was halted briefly due to low levels on the Mississippi River near Greenville, Miss.

— The vantage point from the top of the three-story coal loading dock allowed Marty Shell to count the fleet of barges docked in his port on the Arkansas River.

“That’s about 32,” Shell said last week, before he pulled out his smart phone and hit the calculator function.

“That’s 2,226 truckloads [of cargo] sitting right here in front of us,” said Shell, who owns and operates Five Rivers Distribution LLC, a private port in Van Buren.

Barge congestion on the drought-stricken Mississippi River has slowed things down a bit in Van Buren and in ports on the 445-mile McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System, but not enough to significantly affect operations, port executives said.

“You’ve got this clog, kind of like when a traffic light goes out,” Shell said. “We’re going to experience some congestion, but it will unclog itself.

“It’s like going from a sixlane highway to a two-lane highway,” he said. “But it hasn’t hurt us.”

The amount of products moving along the “liquid highway” is actually outpacing the 2011 figure, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The waterway’s major municipal ports - Catoosa, Okla., Fort Smith, Little Rock and Pine Bluff - along with a dozen or so privately operated ports have combined to handle 7.6 million tons of cargo through August, according to the Corps of Engineers.

That’s an increase of 8 percent over last year’s eight month total of 7.1 million.

The Arkansas River in Arkansas and Oklahoma has been unaffected by the drought. That’s due to the McClellan-Kerr system of dams, locks and dikes to keep the river’s depth predictable and free of debris.

By shunting excess water into pools, the dams keep the flow of the river within accept-able limits.

But traffic on the lower Mississippi is another story. It has been choked because of record low water levels. Barges have been forced to carry lighter loads to avoid grounding in the shallow river.

And last month, the U.S. Coast Guard briefly closed an 11-mile section of the river near Greenville, Miss., when a towboat grounded.

Paul Latture, executive director of the Little Rock Port Authority, said there’s been “minimal” effect on his operation.

“There is a backlog. It takes a while to unclog it,” Latture said.

He compared the situation to when bad weather forces Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport to shut down, causing delays and cancellations of flights around the United States.

The barges along the Mc-Clellan-Kerr are behind schedule anywhere from a week to two weeks, he said.

Lou Ann Nisbett, who oversees the Port of Pine Bluff in her role as president and chief executive officer of the Economic Development Alliance for Jefferson County, said there’s been some small delays because of the Mississippi issue.

“But it hasn’t impacted our port at all,” Nisbett said. “It’s pretty much business as usual.”

The delays don’t mean harvested crops are going to spoil while sitting on the docks, the operators said. The ports in Fort Smith, Van Buren, Little Rock and Pine Bluff don’t export much in the way of farm and food products.

“We don’t do any agricultural products of note except for fertilizer,” Latture said, adding that the port moves steel coils, steel products, wire rod coils, scrap steel and other products.

Downstream ports are the state’s prime movers of fall harvest crops, Latture said.

Commerce at the Port of Little Rock, where about 2,400 people are employed in nearly 40 industries, is on pace for a string year, with 420,000 tons passing through from January through June, Latture said.

Last year, the port recorded roughly 710,000 tons of cargo, Latture said. In 2010, that figure was about 733,000, he said.

GLOBAL TRADING

At 1,460 miles, the Arkansas River is the third-longest within the United States. It begins in the Colorado Rockies, cuts across Kansas and northeast Oklahoma before arcing around Fort Smith to form the city’s northern boundary.

By the time the McClellan-Kerr system was completed in 1970, it was the largest civilworks project ever undertaken by the Corps of Engineers. It cost taxpayers $1.2 billion. It was named for then-U.S. Sens. John L. McClellan, D-Ark., and Robert S. Kerr, D-Okla., who played large roles in getting the project funded.

President Richard Nixon dedicated the system in 1971.

The channel for commercial barges begins on the Verdigris River in Catoosa, near Tulsa. It crosses into Arkansas at Fort Smith and slashes diagonally through the state, then crossing to the White River via a canal near Arkansas Post. Ten miles later, it empties into the Mississippi River near Rosedale, Miss.

In Van Buren and Fort Smith, the predominant import is steel - including coiled plate, coiled wire rod and bars that will be used by industries in Northwest Arkansas, Shell said.

“Right now we move approximately 400,000 tons per year through the Port of Van Buren and the Port of Fort Smith,” he said. “That gives customers in this area an opportunity not only to [ship] their goods in this area, it also gives global trading to our customers in Fort Smith and Northwest Arkansas.

“It allows them the ability to bring goods in from overseas and to take their goods overseas, as well,” he said. “Public ports and private ports help move those goods.”

Shell, 40, has been in the family business for 17 years. His late father, Buck, worked for ports in Pine Bluff and Fort Smith before going out on his own in the mid 1990s.

In 1996, Buck Shell established Five Rivers - a reference to the Arkansas, White, Mississippi, Red and Ouachita rivers.

The 15-acre port sits on mile 299 of the McClellan-Kerr system and has a 120,000-squarefoot climate-controlled warehouse, a coal storage pad, and a convoy of forklifts and frontend loaders.

It is perfectly situated to serve manufacturers in Benton and Washington counties along with the likes of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Tyson Foods, Inc. and J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Shell said.

“We sit in a perfect location for handling commerce, not just for this region, not just for this state, but for the entire central United States,” Shell said.

“Everything I handle either comes from another country or goes to another country,” he said.

Business, Pages 25 on 09/13/2012

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