A Mission for the Future
The McAlpine Locks Project, due to its dependency on Congressional appropriations, won't be completed until 2007, but its transformation is crucial to Louisville's economy

STAND on the superstructure and look around: a panorama of activity, a scene from an essay on "Commerce" come to life. There are trains and buses and trucks and cars; airplanes and even a blimp (on Derby Day); boats and tugs and barges; bridges; a hydroelectric station; a dam and in the distance the towers of a thriving city.

It is all here because of what you are astride -- the locks and canal that allows the Ohio River and its commercial traffic to bypass the barrier of the Falls of the Ohio. Now the Falls are a popular Indiana state park and the busy locks and canal serve twenty barge tows a day.

Because that barge tow traffic is expected to increase by 150 percent in the next 50 years, the McAlpine Locks and the Portland Ship Canal are undergoing a major transformation. A $300 million renovation project will replace two antiquated auxiliary locks with a new 1,200-foot parallel lock system. The project, which has been in planning for nine years, is expected to be completed in 2007.

While crucial to the local economy, according to Louisville's political and economic leadership, the McAlpine project is also part of a wider program to accommodate increased barge traffic on the 600-mile stretch of the Ohio River that borders Kentucky.

The overall plan, primarily the responsibility of the Louisville District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, includes a similar project at the Olmstead Dam near Cairo, Illinois at the confluence with the Mississippi River and long-range plans to construct parallel locks systems at the other six dams on the Kentucky portion of the river. (Smithland Dam, built in 1979, already has the parallel 1,200-foot locks.) Those future plans will not be realized until next century, however. The Corps calls it "a mission without end."

The Corps of Engineers, which is primarily staffed by civilians, has responsibility for the safety and efficiency of internal navigation under the 1910 Rivers and Harbors Act.

As such, its primary focus is commercial traffic, now vast barge tows, although pleasure boats may also use the facilities. No tolls are charged for the locking procedure; commercial shippers pay a 20-cent-a-gallon diesel fuel tax into the Inland Waterways Trust Fund that in turn pays one-half the construction costs, with the remainder coming from annual Congressional appropriations. Operating costs are currently paid through annual appropriations but Congress may increase the diesel fuel tax by one or two cents to cover all annual expenditures.

This dependency on annual appropriations is what causes the Corps to hesitate to assign a specific final date for the McAlpine project, although it just received a boost when Congress did appropriate $10.8 million for one supporting element.

The McAlpine project consists of six phases. Already completed, in addition to the planning, are the site construction office which will eventually be converted into a visitor's center. Three phases are now underway: reconstruction of the service wharf, the fabrication of spare seven-story lock gates (in case of a disastrous accident) and construction of a new bat mooring facility and repair facility. The latter project is the one now fully financed by the recent $10.8 million appropriation.

In addition to these support elements, the Corps has also ordered the building of the world's largest floating crane, which will be based at McAlpine. It is designed to lift the permanent gate into place (and also replacements if ever needed) and to service the other locks and dams on the Ohio. This monster crane is expected to arrive in Louisville in March, 2000, although it is already booked for several years' of assignments along the river.

The two principal phases of the project consist of removing the two antiquated auxiliary locks and building the new 1,200-foot parallel lock. These require the construction of cofferdams at either end to divert the river away from the work area for several years. Then the two locks will be dismantled by dynamite and chipping. Debris will be utilized to fill low-lying areas on adjacent Shippingport Island and to shore up eroding sections of the riverbank along the entire river. The Corps does not anticipate encountering any toxic materials in this phase, according to George Flickner, the new project manager for the Louisville District Office.

Because the oldest auxiliary lock was built of unmortared sandstone blocks, those will be removed intact and donated to Jefferson County, the City of Louisville and the Waterfront Development Corporation for use in parks. Some will be preserved for display at the new visitors center.

Also scheduled to be preserved in some form are the two steel bridges that span the locks and provide access onto Shippingport Island. (They will be replaced by a new single-span concrete arch). One, a swing bridge erected in 1922, is considered particularly significant. Both will be preserved intact and offered at no cost to any public group that could use them. "They can be hauled out intact by the giant crane and taken anywhere you want," John Zimmerman, the former project engineer explains. "But I don't know if we will have any takers."

Before the Corps can donate the bridges, however, it must acquire them. Both currently are the property of LG&E Energy Corp., which also owns Shippingport Island and its hydroelectric dam below the Falls. The Corps hopes to complete negotiations for the two bridges in a few months. It assumes LG&E will donate them in exchange for its use of the new concrete span, Zimmerman continues.

Public support for the McAlpine project is important to the Corps, beyond its need for annual appropriations. The new visitors center is expected to accommodate a significant increase in attendance, beyond the 50,000 annual visitors today. (More than any other lock and dam on the Ohio River). But the displays will focus only on the historic Portland Ship Canal and McAlpine Locks, so as not to detract from the nearby Portland Museum and the Falls of the Ohio State Park, Zimmerman emphasized.

The McAlpine Locks are already a highlight on Riverwalk, a walking and bike trail that currently extends from Waterfront Park to Chickaaw Park, with extensions planned eastward to Harrods Creek and westward atop the levee to the Farnsley Moreman House and dock (the base for the Spirit of Jefferson riverboat). A similar trail is being planned on the Indiana side from the Falls eastward through Jeffersontown.

Indeed, the entire canal area, from the Louisville waterfront to the K&I railroad bridge below the falls and locks is contained within the Falls of the Ohio National Wildlife Conservation Area, created by Congress in 1982. "We are stewards of the river," Zimmerman stressed. Consequently, the Corps believes it will actually improve the clarity of the Ohio, once the construction is completed, by permitting a more constant flow of the current and the subsequent dissipation of silt and debris. As a result, Zimmerman and Flickner, the latter an ardent fisherman, believe that two threatened species -- the paddlefish and lake sturgeon -- may increase significantly when the project is completed.

Safety is always an issue. Except for the collision between a barge and the locks in 1994 there have been no major incidents in the Louisville area. The Coast Guard, which monitors commercial traffic through its Louisville area Marine Safety Office, does not believe there has been a fatality involving a commercial barge in more than a decade.

A near miss occurred this fall when a University of Louisville practice racing shell collided with a barge and was destroyed. The were no injuries, and the Coast Guard found the U of L crew at fault. "There's not a lot of disputing what happened," Lt. Dwayne Adkins of the Coast Guard said, stressing that a fully-loaded barge, even toiling upriver at 10 knots or less, can require more than a mile to come to a dead stop.

While it has maintained and expanded the locks and canal for 125 years, the Corps of Engineers did not initiate the project. The first plan for a canal bypassing the Falls was proposed for the Indiana side by Aaron Burr in 1807. Nothing came of those plans, primarily because the northern side of the river was too marshy for dredging and the Falls themselves too durable for blasting.

The Falls were, and are, a formidable barrier to navigation -- a two-mile stretch of exposed limestone reef and cascades that drop 37 lateral feet. Portland and Louisville were founded primarily as the end points of an arduous portage around the Falls.

Finally, in 1825, a private stock company chartered by the Commonwealth, the Louisville and Portland Canal Company, began building the first canal with three locks, to accommodate flat and keel boats. It was completed in 1830 and was intended to be usable forever. But by 1852, with the rise of steamboats, the canal was already becoming obsolete.

In 1874, with expansion disrupted by the Civil War, Congress appropriated the Portland Canal and Locks and assigned the Corps to build a modern replacement, one that could service the 6,000 steamboats then plying the river. The Corps responded with the 360-foot lock it is now replacing and again in 1922 with the 600-foot auxiliary lock. The current 1,200-foot lock was built in 1960 and named for William A. McAlpine, the first civilian to be chief engineer of the Louisville District Office. (The present dam and weir were completed in 1927.)

About 20 barge tows a day pass through the locks and canal at this time. But the number "20" doesn't adequately explain their commercial significance. Each barge tow, consisting of one tug and 15 attached barges, has a 22,500-ton or 800,000-bushel capacity, the equivalent of 225 jumbo hopper cars pulled by train engines or 870 semi trucks. Relative to distance, the 1,200-foot long barge tow carries as much coal or grain as 2.75 miles of trains or 34.5 miles of semi trucks.

Now, multiply that by 20 for today's capacity, or 50 for the total in 2050. Just contemplate the savings in air pollution or noise, which the Corps has not calculated. And remember, as the engineers remind us, that the commercial shippers are in effect taxing themselves to pay one-half the cost.

Robert Carter is a staff writer for The Lane Report.

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