BELLEVUE, Iowa — U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa) said she wanted to make updating an aging Mississippi River lock and dam system a long-term priority.
The Iowa representative toured Lock and Dam 12, which was built in 1939, on Monday, June 6.
The federal infrastructure bill passed in 2021 allocated the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Rock Island District $1.2 billion in funding which will be used on projects in Iowa, Illinois, southeast Minnesota, southern Wisconsin and northeast Missouri. Hinson, however, was one of 200 Republicans and six Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives that voted against the bill.
More than 60,000 commercial barges pass through our region each year. In 2017, 532.8 million tons of domestic barge traffic worth $220 billion moved within the Upper Mississippi River system. It includes roughly 57% of U.S. corn exports, valued at $4.8 billion, and 59% of U.S. soybean exports, valued at $12.4 billion.
"As the barges come through the lock and dam system, there's always wear and tear," District Commander Col. Jesse Curry said. "And for a system that is nearly 100 years old, sometimes that wear and tear can become pretty extensive. So the team continues to use the investments that we've received and operations and maintenance funds to get after those highest priority issues and places throughout this facility and many more like it up and down the river, to keep it open, to keep those repairs something that we can plan for versus have to respond to."
Hinson serves on the Appropriations Committee and said she wants to focus on getting more funding for the lock and dam system.
"For me, it's about long-term prioritization of funding," she said. "Some of these long-term investments are really needed, because the shelf life, so to speak, of these projects was only intended to be 50 years or so. And now you're looking at well beyond that."
Lock and Dam 12 is in better shape than some of the other 28 on the upper Mississippi. For example, high on the agenda of projects are improvements at Lock and Dam 25 in the St. Louis area, but Aaron Dunlop, the Rock Island District's Mississippi River project operation manager, pointed out some of the aging infrastructure present in Bellevue.
"Out on the end of the dam, there's a little red crane with a black railing around it," Dunlop said. "It's a pretty critical piece of equipment here. We use it to set bulkheads here in the dam, if there's some sort of emergency in the dam, all the bulkheads would be set by that. And other maintenance that needs to be done on the dam would be done by that crane."
The crane, he said, is from the 1970s and was deadlined in the Rock Island district five years ago due to safety concerns.
"All of the bridge cranes have been sort of decommissioned and they've just been sitting more or less in a mothball state. The crane portion of the lifter still can set bulkheads in an emergency," Dunlop said. "If there's a bigger problem, we would have to get a maintenance lead, potentially, to come here and do that work, and the scheduling for that will take them much longer and be more expensive to do that repair."
Lock and Dam 12 will be drained completely for maintenance and repairs within the next year Curry said.
"There's a lot going on here below the waterline," Curry said. "It's going to pump all the water all the way down to the bottom to get in those things that haven't been seen in 25 or 30 years."
Lock and Dam 15 was dewatered in January.
Hinson is also advocating for more resources for the Navigation Ecosystem Sustainability project that will focus on the environmental aspect of the river.