An effort that began nearly a century ago to ensure safe passage for barges on the Mississippi River resumes on Wednesday.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will be removing stone from the riverbed – this time near Cape Girardeau -- to clear a channel that’s at least 9 feet deep and 300 feet wide.
The Corps’ Michael Rodgers said the agency removed rock during the 1920s, 1960s, and 1980s. Last winter, the work resumed when river levels dipped to near-record lows from St. Louis south to the Ohio River confluence.
Rodgers said new technology will allow them to target remaining outcroppings of stone left over from the last ice age.
“It’s called a hydro-hammer,” Rodgers said. “It’s basically a glorified jack hammer that’s an attachment. That can go below the water surface and it breaks up the rock material to sizes where the excavator can actually remove it and relocated it to deep portions of the river.”
A wet spring this year led to flooding, but a dry fall has the river low again. At Thebes, Ill., the river was at 7 feet on Tuesday - 26 feet below flood stage.
“The contractor will basically be jumping around from point to point on the river to remove most restrictive rock locations,” Rodgers said. “Some locations there’s 20 cubic yards in an area and in some there’s a couple hundred.”
Rodgers says the project this winter is expected to relocate roughly 28 hundred cubic yards of rock to deeper areas of the river. It is an extension of work that began last winter when the middle Mississippi reached to near-record low levels after months of drought. Though barge loads were limited, the rock removal helped keep the river open to barge traffic.