Traffic backs up on Ohio River awaiting lock repair

February 3, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

GREENUP, Ky. (AP) — Barges carrying coal, chemicals and other bulk products have been backing up on the Ohio River at the Greenup Locks and Dam while the structure is being repaired.

The Ashland Daily Independent reports chemical plants that depend on shipments and power plants reliant on coal may run short and face slowdowns.

“It’s a very big deal, with significant impact to Pittsburgh and beyond,” said David Smith, legislative and media committee chair of the Huntington District Waterways Association. “It’s truly a system. One glitch has the potential to impact everything else.”

The problem started on Jan. 27 when a miter gate was damaged on the 51-year-old lock’s main chamber. The Army Corps of Engineers said there was a break in the anchorage that supports one of the gates on the lower end of the lock, forcing the corps to stop river traffic until it could be stabilized.

The corps opened an auxiliary chamber on Saturday, but then closed it on Sunday and reopened it Tuesday. The auxiliary gate takes about three hours to pass through, compared with 45 minutes for the main one. Engineers are estimating it will take six to eight weeks to repair the main gate.

The site on the river between Greenup County, Ky., and Lawrence County, Ohio, is about 24 miles downstream from Huntington, W.Va.

Companies that depend on river traffic are seeing a business slowdown.

“A lot of our fleet work is hampered,” said Rob Lynch, a project manager for McGinnis Inc., of South Point, Ohio.

Among other things, McGinnis boats assemble and disassemble strings of barges, similar to the way a switching locomotive adds and removes cars from a train. There is less work to do because not as many tows are coming through.

“It’s not a complete game-changer, but it surely hampers the ability to do business on the river,” Lynch said.

Meanwhile, the corps is still making repairs to the Markland Locks and Dam near Warsaw in northern Kentucky. An auxiliary lock has been handling river traffic there since September, when a miter gate fell off its hinges.