City Manager Rager has offered an ordinance to enter into a General Fund Professional Service Agreement with the Port Authority (on the behalf of the River Advisory Council) to contract for its services in putting together an Ohio River Impact Study to assess the impact of river transportation and port activities on the Cincinnati area.

 

Study partners would include the City, the Ohio Department of Development, the Greater Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce and unnamed river businesses for a study that will cost somewhere around $10,000.  The City would chip in $5,000 for such a study.

 

As it stands right now, Cincinnati is the fifth largest inland port, and over 52 million tons of goods are shipped annually through the port.  There are over 40 barge facilites along the Ohio and Licking rivers.  The study will assess how much the economic prosperity of the area is affected by the utilization of the river.

 

This has gone to the Economic Development Committee, with no timetable for return.

 

To see the purposes of this study explained in detail:

http://city-egov.rcc.org/BASISCGI/BASIS/council/public/child/DDD/17544.pdf

 

I wonder what the four larger inland ports are...maybe Great Lakes cities plus St. Louis?

I always thought the answer was Pittsburgh, but I was wrong.

 

Number 1 is Huntington, though "Huntington" is defined as an impossibly large area.  St. Louis is #2, Pittsburgh is #3 and Memphis is #4.

 

Here's a list of the top 20.  It's from 2003, though, and I haven't been able to find any more current stats:

http://www.iwr.usace.army.mil/ndc/wcsc/pdf/inlandport03f.pdf

 

The Great Lakes are out because they handle large ship traffic--like the ones that ply the oceans--thus they are considered in a different category for some reason.

 

Ocean-going vessels only come up as far as Baton Rouge through the Mississippi system, that's why New Orleans and BR aren't on this list.  The distinction is that virtually all of the shipping on the Mississippi system is by barge, not self-propelled vessels.  A lot of the action down by Baton Rouge is transfering bulk materials between ships and barges.  The other major Gulf ports are Mobile and Houston.  A relatively small amount of tranfering goes on there between ships and barges because there is relatively little barge traffic on the Intercoastal Waterway as compared to the Mississippi system. 

where is Huntington?  Huntington WV????? :?

^Indeed.  But since that includes the navigable portions of the Kanawha river, I'm assuming that area includes Charleston.

 

I'm surprised that, except for Tulsa, OK, all of the top 20 largest inland ports from east of (or right on) the Mississippi...nothing off the Missouri River?  The Red, the Brazos?  I guess major industry is pretty much all east?

 

>all of the top 20 largest inland ports from east of (or right on) the Mississippi...nothing off the Missouri River?

 

I think that list is a bit suspect.  I used to live in Knoxville, which was #20 on that list, and only a few barges per month ran through the Ft. Louden lock to maybe one or two riverfront operations.  Surely there is more traffic on the Red River -- I believe an I-20 or I-40 bridge was destroyed by a barge a few years ago on there.  I think a small amount of traffic also reaches Kansas City but I might be incorrect. 

 

 

BTW, the ordinance I mentioned in my first post passed unanimously in Wednesday's council meeting.

Jake, that was the I-40 bridge over the Arkansas River in Webber Falls, Oklahoma:

 

http://www.answers.com/topic/the-i-40-bridge-disaster

 

(I had to google to remember...)

I don't know how many barges he was pushing but even empties have the weight to do a ton of damage.  Barges hit bridges all the time but collapses are pretty rare. One of the bridges in Baton Rouge got hit by a 20~ barge tow in 1997 and survived.  The engineer randomly happened to have his new video camera on board and filmed the actual collision and all the barges breaking up and that footage was used in court but wasn't released to the media. One of the chemical barges flipped and a cloud of benzene drifted over the city. Johnny Cochran filed a class action lawsuit and I typed a few hundred claims into the computer for a winter break data entry gig.  People's claimed symptoms were outrageous and it being Louisiana people could barely write a sentence.  I remember I had to type in the misspellings because the computer version had to be the same as the handwritten version.

That actually sounds like a cool gig - most of the data entry jobs I've had have been pretty mind-numbing - at least that would be amusing!

Toledo is the largest international port on the Great Lakes.

http://www.glc.org/dredging/lakes/lakesText.html

 

That sounds suspicious...digging around...

 

According to the American Association of Port Authorities, Toledo in total moved 9.9MM short tons in 2003 - 7.7MM foreign, the rest domestic.  Compare that to Duluth, with 13.1MM short tons of foreign shipping (and a total of 38MM!).  Toledo doesn't even move 2/3rds as much foreign cargo as Duluth.

 

According to the Toledo Port Authority, the port moved 9.4MM short tons in 2004 and 10.7MM in 2005.  That's total volume, not just international, and even so, it's still below Duluth's international alone: http://www.duluthport.com/tonnagestats/yearend-20045-tonnage.html (they use metric tons - to convert to short tons, multiply metric tons by 1.1025) - so they did 15.5MM short tons of foreign trade in Duluth in 2004 (couldn't find 2005 numbers).  Toledo may be 2nd, but they ain't anywhere near first.  Don't know who wrote that webpage, but they ought to check with their friendly local Port Authorities first!

 

Again, from the American Association of Port Authorities, here's a list of the top US ports by cargo tonnage.  Looks like the top ten US Great Lakes ports, in order, would be:

 

Duluth-Superior, MN and WI 38,343,379

Chicago, IL 22,609,742

Detroit, MI 14,308,032

Indiana Harbor, IN 14,132,553

Two Harbors, MN 13,032,598

Cleveland, OH 12,620,794

Ashtabula, OH 10,426,942

Toledo, OH 9,864,318

Gary, IN 9,010,338

Presque Isle, MI 8,775,676

 

like I said, depends on the source, the year, and how they measure it.

 

Do you have any idea what source, year or measure they used?  Because everything I'm seeing from every year contradicts their claims...cargo value, tonnage, etc. - nothing corroborates that claim...haven't seen numbers for number of shipments, but that would mean "busiest" to my mind, not "largest."