Locks, Dams Open This Month

STARBUCK - Commerce along one of the state's arteries will soon kick back into gear as major repairs to key locks on the Columbia and Snake rivers draws to completion this month.

Close to 10 million tons of cargo including wheat, barley, petroleum products (like fuel), fertilizer, hay cubes, peas, lentils, milk carton stock and containers full of merchandise are shipped via the Columbia-Snake River system each year. Over 2 million tons are moved just through the Little Goose navigation lock near Starbuck.

The river locks have been closed to all traffic for the past three months while the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers conducted a $46 million retrofi t of three navigation locks on the system, including those at Lower Monumental Dam, The Dalles Dam and John Day Dam.

Other dams affected by the outage included Ice Harbor, Little Goose and Lower Granite.

All dams and locks are scheduled to be reopened by the end of March. The dams and locks were closed in December and January.

Navigation locks on the four Lower Snake River Dams will be the first to reopen. The locks at Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose and Lower Granite dams will go back into service March 15 at 5 p.m. On the Columbia River, the lock at McNary Dam will reopen March 17 at 5 p.m.

Dams further downstream on the Columbia, at the Oregon border, will open last, with the final reopening being March 24 with The Dalles Dam.

"We understand the impact this outage has had on our navigation stakeholders," the Corps sympathized in a press release. "We have been closely coordinating the development of outage schedules with shippers and their customers, so they can develop and communicate alternative transportation plans."

The alternative to the outage, of course, could have been disastrous. An unplanned emergency outage would have shut down the navigation locks for a year or more. "Completing this project will help the Corps assure the viability of the Columbia- Snake navigation system for decades to come," according to the Corps.

December through March is always a busy time for the export of wheat crops, said Dave Gordon, general manager for Northwest Grain Growers, which owns one barge house on the Snake River and two on the Columbia. Winter and spring wheat crops are harvested from July through October. And close to 100 percent of wheat grown in the Touchet Valley is exported to Asian countries, such as Japan and Korea, or the Middle East.

In fact, the Columbia- Snake River system is the number one wheat and barley export gateway in the nation and the second largest inland waterway system in the country next to the Mississippi, according to the Association of Washington Businesses.

The only other methods for shipping commodities into and out of the Touchet Valley are by rail or truck, and costs are usually three times higher to ship by rail and as much as 15 times higher by truck.