Waterways Receive D-minus in ASCE Report

The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation’s inland waterways system a grade of D-minus in its recently-released Infrastructure Report Card.

The low grade is because of the poor condition and age of the locks and dams on the system which consists of 12000 miles of navigation channels and 257 locks in four river systems.

|!|Forty-seven percent of all locks maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were classified as functionally obsolete in 2006. Assuming that no new locks are built within the next 20 years by 2020 another 93 existing locks will be obsolete rendering more than eight out of every 10 locks now in service outdated|!| the report stated.