The Waterways Journal

Cornel Martin in the Daytona Beach News-Journal on the need for greater attention to waterways.

The US Army Corps of Engineers will offer Missouri River updates at
facebook.com/OmahaUSACE and at twitter.com/OmahaUSACE. – Flood response information is at www.nwo.usace.army.mil

So far, the most serious flooding has been along the Ohio River, and south of the confluence with the Ohio along the Mississippi River.

But now it’s the Missouri River’s turn. “In the last month, the river’s upper basin received a year’s worth of rain, said Jody Farhat, chief of the water management division.”

The Coast Guard’s river traffic restrictions have eased fears of Natchez waterside businesses that were worried about wakes.

The publication of an 88-year-0ld retired barge captain’s memoirs of 50 years spent barging on English waterways prompts reflection in the Yorkshire Post.

“LAURIE Dews retired from the wheel of his barge Selby Margaret on the River Ouse on his 65th birthday in 1987. He was one of the last vestiges of the river’s history that will never be resuscitated. He had watched it die over 20 years, and while sad to say farewell to a life of hard graft and fresh air with the comradeship of the folk on the waterway and their easy, familiar banter, the industry was long past its heyday and all but dead.”

In England (and Europe), a “barge”  or narrowboat is an integrated unit, with engine and living quarters in the rear. While renovated barges are popular as floating living quarters, and London even has a small district of moored barges with gardens on their roofs, commercial barging is dead in England. The government is trying to revive the waterways for recreational use. But the channel widths and depths (most narrow canals are only seven feet wide), and the small size of the locks, make commercial barging as we have it in the U.S. uneconomical.

Norfolk has a mostly natural network of canals and waterways called the Norfolk Broads. Here’s a map of the British waterways.

USA Today gives a shout-out to the Corps of Engineers for the performance of its Mississippi River flood-control system.

As the article points out, New Orleans residents were quick on the draw to blame many of the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the Corps’ failures. We’ll see if credit is given here.

The Decatur (Ala.) Times Daily asks: Could Mississippi River flooding and continued high water and associated tow restrictions divert more traffic to the Tennessee-Tombigbee system this summer?

The Government Accountability Office, the investigativeor “watchdog”
arm of Congress, released on May 10 a scathing report on the TSA/Coast Guard-managed TWIC (Transportation Workers Identity Credential) program. GAO officials conducted a “sting” operation and obtained a TWIC using false documents.

Among the key findings: the Department of Homeland Security presently has no program of internal evaluation that supports its argument that TWICs make us safer.DHS concurred with all of GAO’s recommendations to develop such evaluations.

Waterways Journal readers know, of course, that the TWIC card-readers are not yet available, and won’t be for some time, making the information in the card’s sophisticated biometric chips useless at present.

WARNING: the full report is 60 pages long. The report notes, “This is a public version of a sensitive report. Information DHS deemed sensitive has been redacted.” No doubt this referred to information about how the GAO workers got a TWIC using false documents.

Houma Today created this interactive photo gallery and map of flood news.

Note: you have to click on different tabs to access different features.

Historian David Welky again, this time with a New York Times column in which he praises the Corps’ flood-control efforts since 1937.