KUSI-TV’s website marked National Maritime Day, which was designated by Congress in 1933, by featuring San Diego Bay’s working waterfront. The waterfront is home to the port’s “two marine terminals, where food for the region, such as bananas and melons, one in 10 imported automobiles in the nation, and other goods, including wind turbine blades and lumber, are imported to support our economy,” the site reported.
Direct and indirect annual impact of the U.S. port industry “includes 13.3 million jobs, accounting for $649 billion in personal income and more than $3.15 trillion in marine cargo related spending. The Port of San Diego’s thriving industrial sector creates $48 million in direct annual taxes, KUSI noted.
The Seattle Times reported recently on the impact the $335 million Elliott Bay Seawall being built along the waterfront is having on businesses. The seawall is pat of a ten-plus year infrastructure upgrade along Highway 99 will mean rerouting local roads and moving businesses. The owners of some businesses, like Steve Sarkowsky’s Highway 99 Blues Club, “don’t expect to still be in business when the seawall project is done. And if they are, another threat looms in 2016, when the old viaduct is torn down,” the Times reported, “Everybody here’s going to have issues, not just us,” said Sarkowsky. “There’s going to be casualties.”
The St. Louis CBS affiliate KMOX reports that early June flooding along the Mississippi River is “a hindrance to commerce, especially for barges that rely on the big rivers to move their goods. Debris is being swept downriver, forcing the closure of more than 250 miles of the vital commerce corridor from Iowa to the St. Louis harbor,” the station reported.
“The drift out there is ridiculous,” said Mike Petersen of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “It looks like a forest of trees floating past St. Louis.” Grain shipments couldn’t be moved to the Gulf Coast for export. “Everything from fertilizer to construction materials couldn’t be sent upriver,” the station reported. “And the Mississippi River closure cut off barge access to the Illinois River, a gateway to the Great Lakes.”
Ironically, the problems come just months after shipping on the river “was perilously close to being halted altogether after the nation’s worst drought in decades made river levels nearly too low for barge traffic.”
Flooding from big storms has been a focus in New York after Sandy devastated the coast there and in nearby New Jersey. Scientific American reported on a $19.5 billion plan to protect New York City against future sea level rise and other effects of climate change. A report “prescribes 250 projects ranging from big stone walls to little flood gates intended to hold back storm surges and fend off rising seas,” the magazine wrote.
Meanwhile in Nantucket, the Inquirer & Mirror newspaper reports the island town is still waiting for $500,000 from FEMA after claims were filed with the federal agency following the “glancing blow from Hurricane Sandy and the winter storms in February and March” which damaged Nantucket’s waterfront. “Repairs to a number of areas, from the Easy Street basin to the Town Pier, which suffered significant damage, and Sheep Pond Road on the south shore, are already underway, but [FEMA] reimbursements disaster relief funds have not yet materialized.”
An industry site called DredgingToday.com reports that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Galveston, Texas district is proposing changes to the setback along the Gulf Coast Intracoastal Waterway. Concern about new structures impacting navigation along bends, bridges, mooring facilities, waterfront structural congestion and land encroachments are the focus of the proposed changes.” More than $25 billion worth of goods are transported annually along the Texas portion of the GIWW,” the site reported, “which is also used by many as an access point to navigable waters for both commercial and recreation purposes.”