There is perhaps no single geographic feature that has advanced the American economy more than the Mississippi River. That’s because nowhere else on earth has a river been crafted into this long of a navigable, commercial waterway—nowhere else can one float a barge 1,800 miles or 2,900 kilometers down a river without encountering one stretch of low-water, one bout of rapids, one rock in the way, one single obstacle to seamless, commercial navigation. And compounding this waterway’s supremacy is its tributaries—the Tennessee river extends navigability as far as Knoxville; the Arkansas as far as Tulsa; the Missouri to Sioux City; the Illinois to Chicago; and the Ohio extends almost a thousand river miles from the Mississippi, connecting Pittsburgh to all the rest of the Mississippi River region. The simple fact that goods from Pittsburgh, or Minneapolis, or Omaha, or anywhere else on this

map can be transported exclusively by barge as far as New Orleans, then transferred onto ocean-going vessels bound for… anywhere cannot be overstated. Trucks can move a ton of cargo about 145 miles with a gallon of fuel. Trains, and the reduced friction borne out of steel on steel contact, extend that gallon to 477 miles. But the vessels used on the Mississippi are able to transport that same ton as far as 647 miles on a gallon of fuel. And the cost differential is even greater than the efficiency one due to scale—a single barge equals the capacity of 35 rail cars or 134 trucks, but a single tug can push upwards of 30, sometimes even 40 barges, leading to tremendous economies of scale. By one estimate, while trucks cost an average of $5.35 per ton, per mile, and trains $2.53, tugs transport that same ton a mile at a cost

of just 97 cents. The friction of difference just works differently in the United States. Especially because beyond the Mississippi and its tributaries, there’s still the entire Great Lakes system. The Soo Locks, in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, allow for navigation from Lake Superior to the rest of the Great Lakes. By some measures, these are America’s most important locks as nearly 100% of the country’s Iron Core pellets pass through them on their way to lake-side processing plants in Indiana and Ohio. But if not carrying iron, a vessel from Duluth can float through Lake Huron, then Erie, take this Canadian canal system that bypasses the impassable Niagara Falls, then make its way through the St Lawrence Seaway System to access the Atlantic Ocean. Add on the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest, connecting inland ports as far as Idaho to the ocean; the Sacramento Deep Water Ship Channel, connecting California’s

capital to San Francisco Bay; the Hudson River, extending navigability through New York state; and a few others. The US boasts over 12,000 miles or 19,000 kilometers of commercially navigable inland waterways—that’s a longer transportation system than the entire rail network of the United Kingdom. But perhaps the greatest indicator of just how important America’s inland waterways are is how involved the Federal government is in running them. DC doesn’t really run transportation systems—the rails are almost entirely privately owned, airports are primarily handled by local governments, even Interstates—the Federal network of highways—are just funded by DC, but actually owned and run by the states themselves. The Mississippi and these other navigable, inland waterways are a rare example of the Federal government actually running a transportation system on a day-to-day basis. Specifically, and perhaps bizarrely, it’s a branch of the Army—the Army Corps of Engineers—that’s

responsible for keeping cargo on the river running. They build and run the locks, they dredge it and bolster its banks, and they’re allocated over a billion dollars a year to do it. And it's these locks that have quite literally kept the American agricultural industry alive. Brazil and the US, for example, are the world’s first and second largest soybean exporters, respectively—tightly competing with each other to sell massive volumes of the crop to massive, far-away buyers like China. But it’s remarkable that the US, with a GDP per capita eight times that of Brazil, is able to meaningfully compete in a global marketplace for a commodity, where the only thing that matters to a buyer is cost. But in Brazil, the majority of soybean is brought from farms to ocean ports by trucks, with most of the rest transported by train—both far costlier than barges. Only a tiny portion is transported by water as Brazil just does not

have the inland waterway infrastructure that the US does. Most years, the cost of getting soybean from Brazil to China, for example, is far higher than that of the US—sometimes as much as double. US producers can therefore accept higher production costs since all they have to do is get their product to a river, and from there it can float all the way to Shanghai. But before any soy, chemical, or petroleum product is sent to intermingle with the world economy, it starts in a place like this harbor, where highway, railway, and river intersect and Travero’s Logistics Park Debeque sits. Here, goods, whether by belt and elevator or simple front loader, are poured into a barge operator’s standardized, 195-foot by 35-foot barge, then lashed together with steel cables to another 14 barges and pushed out into the river by diesel-powered tow boat.

Compared to most commercial vessels, crews on these towboats are small—typically less than ten people, composed of a captain, a pilot, a cook, and some engineers and deckhands. Almost universally, they work 6-hour on, 6-hour off schedules, nonstop, for their entire time onboard—typically a 28-day stretch. In practice, a given deckhand might work from 5:30 to 11:30 am, then attempt to get some sleep before starting work again at 5:30 pm, before an abbreviated overnight rest starting at 11:30 pm. The only crew member that doesn’t follow this schedule is the cook, who will generally prepare meals to be ready for 45 or so minutes before and after the 5:30 am, 11:30 am, and 5:30 pm transitions. Crew facilities are also basic. Outside of bedrooms, these boats might have a small gym, crew lounge, and galley.

but that’s about it. After all, when working 12 hours a day, there’s really not much time left for anything but sleeping and eating. And there’s plenty that gets done in those 12 hours-on. Just 16 miles or 25 kilometers down the river from Travero’s Logistics Park sits Lock and Dam no. 12. On the Upper Mississippi, there’s never more than a couple dozen miles to go before arriving to a lock and dam. Tows notify the lock master over radio when they’re about 30 minutes away, which gives the operator time to prepare the lock—filling it with water if a boat’s approaching from upstream, or draining if the opposite. Tow captains must approach each lock carefully, tightly lining up with the wall that marks its approach. After all, there is often a current, called an out-draft, pulling from the entrance of the lock towards the dam,

since that’s where the water flows when the lock is closed. Getting sucked into this current can and sometimes does prove disastrous—it’ll trap a tow upstream of the dam and potentially destroy the structure—so captains will often have their own notes written down based on their experience through the years, reminding them of the particularities of each lock. But upon successful approach, a tug pushes its barges into the lock chamber—or at least, half of them. That’s because the Upper Mississippi has 600-foot locks, but the standard tow-size through this stretch is 15-barges in a three by five configuration, leading to an overall length of about a thousand feet. Therefore, deckhands have to spend about a half an hour splitting their tow in two before the lock master can even close the gates and start draining the chamber. That takes about another 20 minutes, then the first half of the tow gets floated out and tied up as the second

half, including the tug itself, waits another 20 minutes for the chamber to fill up with water again. Next, after another 20-minute draining cycle, it takes about an hour for deckhands to put the tow back together, leading to a roughly three to four-hour process of getting through each and every lock—and that’s if they’re lucky. The locks each operate on a first-come, first-served system, meaning if there’s another vessel going through, a tow has to wait up to 3-4 hours before it can go through the 3-4 hour process. In the peak fall grain export season, these delays can really compound and limit the throughput of the river just when it’s needed most. And it’s along this process, passing lock after lock, where it becomes impossible to ignore that the Mississippi, nor the Illinois for that matter, nor the Columbia, nor the upper Danube,

nor the lower Nile are strictly rivers anymore. It’s one thing for a river to be deemed navigable in its simplest definition: to be sailed by ships or boats, but it's another to live up to the haughty standards of what navigable is to, say the US Army Corps of Engineers, whose definition hinges not on the possibility of making it up or down a river but the continued, consistent, reliability of travel along the river for the purpose of commerce. Rivers, no matter the state, country, or continent, are just fickle. Changing shape and course by the season and the year, they’re difficult to govern physically and politically. Consider just the task of defining what the Mississippi river really is. At base, you could start with this map. But that wouldn’t consider some of its most important tributaries such as these. And still, this is oversimplified, as supplying a river that on average moves nearly

500,000 cubic feet of water through it every single second, requires the tributaries of these tributaries, along with the unseen groundwater from across the river’s entire basin draining eventually into this cumulative flow. From this more holistic—albeit, far from exhaustive—view of the river, the Mississippi river’s an assemblage of gravity-fed water from 41% of the lower 48’s landmass spread across 32 American states and two Canadian provinces. As an amalgamation of precipitation spread across thousands of miles, the river’s disposition is defined by its broader basin. Massive rain here, for instance, could lead to flooding along the river below, as it did in 1927 when a swollen Mississippi killed 500 and left hundreds of thousands displaced. Massive earthquakes here, could fundamentally reshape the river’s path, as they did in 1811 and 1812. And a low snow year here, and hot dry summer here could bring

flows down to levels so low that it threatens grain shipping in the fall, as they did in 2012. On the inverse, what a river does provide that an interstate or rail line can’t is the efficiency boost of buoyancy, and what a river offers that a canal can’t, is the natural plumbing—which, while not perfectly streamlined nor always dependable, provides a far more advanced starting point. To first turn a river into a navigable waterway capable of powering international commerce, there needs to be a legal framework as to who has purview over the river. In the US, beginning in the 1800s as the fledgling federal government scrambled to create effective efficient means of transportation to spur on economic activity, the responsibility of turning natural features into navigable ones fell on the US Army Corps of Engineers. On the Mississippi, their work began with this, the designation of the Mississippi River Commission and the exploratory

mission to figure out how its flows could be harnessed for the purposes of interstate trade. First, the goal was to provide, from the upper river below, a consistent 4-foot or 1.3-meter deep channel. As time went on, the ask grew. Then it was a 4.5-foot-deep channel, then a consistent 6-foot deep channel, then finally, with the rivers and harbors act of 1930, a 9-foot or 3-meter deep channel. For the river’s upper reaches, this meant significant reconfiguration. Split at St. Louis, the Mississippi River has two rather distinct dispositions. From St. Paul to St. Louis, the river moves quicker, it’s smaller in stature, and it’s comparatively steep—dropping 400 feet or 120 meters over 670 miles or 1100 kilometers. Or it was. Now, just

about wherever you zoom in on this upper section. It looks pretty uniform, it’s wide, it’s smooth, and every couple dozen miles, it’s dammed. These dams and accompanying locks, all 27, aren’t for storage or flood control, but for transportation, representing a massive 1930s federal investment in turning a wild river into a consistent canal for the benefit of midwestern agricultural exporters upon which the whole region still relies. Some ninety years on, the corps of engineers still maintains and operates these locks, and in the intermediate decades, they’ve expanded to account for 192 navigational locks nationwide. The locks end at St. Louis, not long after the Mississippi has added the flow of the Illinois and just before it adds the Ohio. And it’s here where the river’s character flips. From Cairo, Illinois to Vicksburg, Mississippi the river has only

600 miles to travel to the Gulf Coast. But with only 300 feet or 100 meters of elevation to drop across that entire stretch, the river restlessly meanders across its massive historical floodplain, creating a winding path to the ocean that stretches out to about 1,000 miles or 1,600 kilometers. Through the lower Mississippi, average flows are high enough to deem navigational locks and dams unnecessary, but with so much water and so many bends along a flat landscape come other challenges for the corps of engineers. If one is to drive along a county road along the lower Mississippi, there's a good chance they can’t see it, that it’s on the other side of a grassy mound. If one is to look at the lower Mississippi from above, there’s a good chance they’ll notice that these grassy mounds don’t meander like the river, but make unnatural,

calculated, perfectly straight lines across the landscape. These are the over 2,000 miles of levee, built primarily by the Army Corps of Engineers, that millions count on to keep the flooding Mississippi out of their towns and homes when it does dump in the upper reaches in the basin, and that barge operators count on to keep the Mississippi in a single, dependable channel. Of course, levees, while noticeable to the trained eye, are easy to miss. The same can be said about the locks and dams, just relatively low-lying structures spread along what seems to be a reasonably slow and easy-to-contain section of river. Like the structures, the continued upkeep of the river is easy to overlook, too. Dredging, after all, isn’t terribly visible to the outside observer, it’s moving sand and silt and sediment from a river bottom. And yet,

continued dredging to keep the channel at 9 feet deep from 2014 to 2023 in the upper Mississippi cost on average $45 million a year. The same goes for revetment, the process of stabilizing river banks with concrete matting—it’s difficult to notice unless you put it in, and yet, the Armor 1, a vessel tasked with laying down the matting to hold the river in place for another 50 years cost a reported $125 million. All that’s to say, while rightly paraded as a geographic superpower, navigable waterways are hardly natural systems; they’re expensive-to-maintain hybrids with a heavy human touch. And in the case of most around the US, the critical human additions that make these safe and reliable for the frailest of barges and towboats are often overlooked and getting really old. Take locks—with most being built mid-century,

or in the case of those along the Mississippi, even earlier, nearly all have outlived their estimated 50-year expected lifespan. While still operational, they’re increasingly unreliable. As a 2023 Department of Transportation report noted, from 2010 to 2020, across 192 lock sites, while total lockages have declined, the percentage of vessels delayed has climbed from the 30s into the 50s. More problematic: the average delay tripled in duration from 2010 to 2019. And while shipping companies can mitigate problems when it comes to planned delays, in 2020, about a third of all lock delays were unscheduled. In the American Society of Civil Engineers’ most recent infrastructure report card, inland waterways received a D+ while noting that the Army Corps of Engineers reports both a $6.8 billion backlog on projects that have been approved but not financed.

and $2.7 billion annually on funds not received to do annual required maintenance. Making things even more difficult, and inland rivers even less dependable, is less consistent weather and increasingly common and increasingly extreme weather events. The Mississippi has had low water years in 2012, in 2013, in 2022, ‘23, and ‘24, for instance, while also massively flooding in 2019. Then there’s the fact that fundamentally, the locks along most American rivers are just too small to serve today’s purposes. Much discussion is made over whether the Federal Government should upgrade the river to 1,200-foot locks—the size that could allow Upper Mississippi tows to make their way through in just one cycle, rather than two. This would increase throughput enormously—the three or more hour process of passing a lock would go by in just 30 or so minutes, saving days of time across one Minneapolis to St Louis journey. Delays

at the locks, waiting for other traffic to clear, would become a thing of the past, and shipping rates might go down, allowing an ever-so-slightly expanded profit margin for farmers in Illinois and Iowa and beyond. And in fact, we’ll even get to see what this looks like in practice. Construction has started at lock 25, just north of St. Louis, to build a brand-new 1,200-foot lock. Funding was secured as part of the Biden Administration’s Infrastructure Act, and construction is expected to be completed… sometime in the 2030s. Also, the total amount allocated for the project was $732 million. That’s to say, upgrading the entire Upper Mississippi’s locks would possibly be a project rivaling the annual budget of NASA. And it’s not like there’s a lot of revenue that can pay for these upgrades. The Mississippi is completely free to use—including its locks. They’ll open and close for any vessel,

commercial or recreational, without charging a cent… at least directly. The Federal Government does charge a 29 cent per gallon tax on fuel used by commercial barges on designated inland waterways in most circumstances, which goes into a trust fund that is primarily used for construction projects on the waterways, rather than operations. So in 2020, for example, $131 million of the Army Corps of Engineering’s spending on inland waterways came from this fund, but this was out of a total annual cost of $1.3 billion. So that’s to say, the inland waterways effectively act as a massive subsidy from the American taxpayer to its users—particularly, to the agriculture industry. One could, and some do argue that this is unfair—for everyone to pay for a system that only benefits the few. This argument is bolstered by the fact that what these waterways are particularly good at is getting bulk quantities of grain and soybean and other

agricultural products to New Orleans to be transferred onto an ocean-going ship for international export. That’s to say, in extreme cases, American taxpayers are paying to expand the profit margins of agribusinesses selling their soybean to China. This is true—unlike roads, there is no significant, direct utility for this transportation system for the general public. But right now, the Mississippi is in this state where it’s extraordinarily expensive to run, but it’s also underfunded. America does rely on it. While some of its utility is enjoyed by all the foreign countries that buy American crops, it simultaneously secures the domestic food supply; it transports raw materials that sit at the start of the supply chain for other industries; in fact, it’s estimated that each day the river closes due to lock failure, for example, costs the American economy $300 million. But despite that, it’s simultaneously

underutilized. Far fewer barges traverse its stretch today than in decades past as freight traffic has moved onto the rails and roads. The rails and road systems are being stretched to their limits—freight railroads are suffering from capacity shortages and fast-deteriorating infrastructure due to their unwillingness to invest in capital improvements, while the trucking industry is suffering from a driver shortage as young people are unwilling to work in the increasingly aged industry. There has been plenty of discussion over developing a network of ports and vessels capable of transporting container cargo up and down the river so it can act as a direct competitor to freight rail and trucks, but so far little has translated into action. The issues of inefficiency and deterioration on the Mississippi are so well-recognized that barge operators themselves successfully advocated to be taxed more—they were the driving force behind the hike from 20 to 29 cents per gallon in 2014 because they so desperately wanted maintenance

and upgrades. But it still wasn’t even close to enough. Right now, the Mississippi and America’s other inland waterways are funded and functional enough that they’re relied upon by whole industries and responsible for the economic ascent of entire regions, but not funded enough that they actually function even close to their full potential. That’s to say, they're great enough to have changed the entire course of American history, but they’re still just not great. One thing I noticed while researching this video is that quite a few academics have attempted to solve the issue of Mississippi River lock delays using data science—after all, even the busiest locks are used well below their theoretical capacity, but still experience delays due to a lack of traffic management. This is a great example of how knowledge in STEM subjects can help solve real-world problems, and our sponsor, Brilliant, is all about helping you

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How Inland Waterways Work

Wendover Productions is all about explaining how our world works. From travel, to economics, to geography, to marketing and more, every video will leave you with a little better understanding of our world. New videos go out every other Tuesday.