Boomtown strikes Central Ferry in the wake of river re-opening

Central Ferry has turned into a boomtown since the Snake River shipping route re-opened last Friday.

Barges, trucks and cranes sprouted up like winter wheat after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ended the longest-ever shutdown of the river shipping route.

“It’s looked like Portland around here, there’s been so many barges,” said Bill Leonard. Leonard has a birds-eye view of Central Ferry from his seat high above the barge loading spout at Columbia Grain’s Central Ferry loading terminal.

Grain is loaded into a Tidewater barge at Columbia Grain’s Central Ferry grain terminal. Barge loading resumed Sunday after dams on the Snake River were re-opened following a three-month shutdown.

Columbia Grain workers have been working 12-hour days to fill grain barges since the river re-opened from its three-month closure.

“It’s good to have it back,” said Randy Olstad, general manager of Columbia Grain’s Clarkston office. “It was fun to watch a tug running up and down the river again on Friday. I guess he was just getting warmed up.”

Freight shipments on the river between Lewiston and Portland were shut down Dec. 10 as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers replaced three gates on navigation locks on its dams along the Snake and Columbia rivers.

The shut-down ended at 11 p.m. Friday with the opening of the new downstream navigation lock at Lower Monumental Dam near Kahlotus.

Primary use of the river is to ship grain from the Palouse hills and wood products from the Idaho mountains to international ports in Portland and Vancouver.

At the Port of Garfield County’s site across the Elmer Huntley Bridge, however, shipments have come up the river with supplies for Puget Sound Energy’s Lower Snake River Wind Farm.

“I can’t recall ever seeing anything but empty barges come up this way,” said Leonard.

Workers with Omega Morgan, a heavy equipment moving firm based in Portland, were busy Tuesday unloading 232-ton transformers onto trucks from a barge that had come upriver.

Tom Young with Houston-based UTC shipping, the lead contractor in charge of moving the transformers, said the transformers had been sitting on the barge in Portland for the past month waiting for the locks to re-open.

“They pushed it back a couple times, so we had to just let them sit there,” said Young.

Each year more than 10 million tons of cargo with a value of $2 billion passes through the corp’s river locks. One four-barge tow can carry 14,000 tons of freight, equivalent to 538.4 semi trucks.

This was the first time the corps had closed the dams for navigation for such an extended period.

The closure was made so crews could replace gates on navigation locks at Lower Monumental, The Dalles and John Day dams. Along with the three new gates, the corps performed in-depth maintenance at Lower Granite, Little Goose, Ice Harbor, McNary and Bonneville dams.

Lower Monumental was the last to open as seals designed to make the lock water-tight had to be re-aligned.

The towboat “Rebel” was the first to pass through Lower Monumental after it pushed two barges - one hauling shipping containers, one loaded with wood chips - through the lock’s new gate at 3 p.m. Saturday, according to Baltrusch.

The old concrete lock went into service April 15, 1969. Baltrusch said the new gate is expected to prolong the life of the navigation lock by 50 years.

Replacement of the Lower Monumental lock was done by Dix Corporation, Spokane, which was lead contractor under a $13.6 million contract.

Overall, the three-month project cost $56.3 million. Federal officials budgeted $50 million in funding from the 2009 stimulus package for the project.

Grain brokers said planning beforehand meant the shutdown’s impact on exports was minimal.

Olstad said about 80 percent of last summer’s crop was shipped before the shutdown. Sales are typically high before December because of tax impacts to farmers, he said.

But high demand this year brought on by a drought in Russia and heavy rains in most of the rest of the wheat growing world held down the global supply of quality wheat.

“Our quality here was by far the best in the world this year,” he said.

Tom Fowler, merchandiser for Almota Elevator Co., said his firm is slated to ship a number of barges early next month. Firms like Almota continued to purchase wheat during the shutdown, and now those shipments are ready to go downstream.

“It really wasn’t that big a deal,” said Fowler. “I hope it never happens again, but we were able to get through it.”