What Happened to the Controversy of Dredging the Columbia River?

There has been significant controversy in the last 16-years about deepening the shipping channel of the Lower Columbia River between Portland and Astoria. While literature and websites abound promoting the economic necessity of doing so, as well as the environmental reasons to not, where is the explanation clarifying the region’s position as a shipping economy? When proponents want to increase the channel another 3-feet I wonder how much bigger a ship will navigate to the handful of deepwater ports between Astoria and Portland. What is the expected market share of our current global economy that has a huge appetite for consumer goods? Is it vital, economically, to dredge the Columbia River? Is it worth it?

This essay cannot attempt to answer all the questions that my research brought up, but it hopes to satisfy some curiosity as to where Portland finds itself, historically and contemporarily, concerning shipping markets and the vessels that support them. This paper is excerpted from one written for a class on the Columbia River and is based on information from a wide variety of sources. Interested parties may contact me for citations or references.

Dredging and Shipping on the Columbia River: What Happened to the Controversy?

When conditions are right I can hear the sound of ships’ horns as they make their way on the rivers in Portland, Oregon. I live less than 4 miles from the Willamette River; it is about 15 miles from my home to Terminal 6, where the Port of Portland’s largest shipping terminal is located on the Columbia River near its confluence with the Willamette. These rivers, along with the boats and ships that ply them, have been important trade conduits in the region since the time early humans inhabited the area. Portland’s place in history is due to these rivers; its fortune and culture is tied to them. Conflicts over their use clearly illustrate tensions between local and global economies, and these in turn show how the rivers’ use effects economic and environmental heath for our region.

History

Humans have substantially altered the Columbia River since 1877 when the Port of Portland was first commissioned by the state to provide a navigable channel between the mouth of the river at Astoria to the northwest’s preeminent economic stronghold, the city of Portland. What was once a 10 to15-foot deep river has been systematically dredged to 40-feet over time, starting first in 1878 when dredging created a 20-foot minimum depth. The shipping channel, a swath that also creates the state line between Washington and Oregon, has been subsequently deepened on a regular basis. According to Mike Stark, “[t]he channel was dug down to 25 feet in 1899 and to 30 feet—and 300 feet wide—in 1912. In 1962, Congress agreed to the most massive change to the shipping channel: a plan to deepen it to 40 feet and double its width to 600 feet. The project was finished in 1976.” Recent efforts to further deepen the channel were started in the late 1980s, a process that has taken us 16-years to 2005. Not only has the river’s depth been significantly changed, and constantly maintained and managed over time, but the boundaries of the river have been modified and constrained by jetties, dikes, and other river-altering processes and structures such as dams and nuclear power plants.

Today

On June 15, 2005 Judge Ricardo Martinez dismissed the efforts of environmentalists to stop the latest proposed deepening project, from 40 feet to 43 feet, on the 103-mile shipping channel of the Columbia River. This last legal hurdle took the form of a lawsuit filed by Northwest Environmental Advocates (NEA) and was only one of many efforts by environmental groups and others to thwart deeper-dredging efforts. In the suit, NEA claimed that the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and the US Department of Fish and Wildlife (USDFW) did not adequately review protections required for endangered salmon species. According to news reports, the federal judge “rejected arguments raised by Northwest Environmental Advocates' lawsuit that the dredging would worsen already degraded salmon habitat in the Columbia Estuary and worsen beach erosion in Washington and Oregon. The judge also rejected arguments that approval of the project by NOAA Fisheries, the federal agency that oversees efforts to restore salmon in danger of extinction, was arbitrary and capricious.” NEA filed an appeal with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco in August 2005, but did not ask for an emergency stop to the work, which began early summer of 2005. The environmental advocacy group does not expect the 9th Circuit court to rule until after the beginning of 2006.

Funding

The USACE hoped to find economies of scale by bidding the deepening work concurrently with maintenance work (yearly dredging to keep the river at its prescribed depth). The deepening project is being done on a limited basis—specific parts of the river are dredged as moneys are made available. As of November 2005 the first funded portion of channel deepening project has been completed near Astoria at the mouth of the river: According to The Daily Astorian, work began June 25 to deepen the first 13 miles from River Mile (RM) 3 to River Mile 16. An additional 10 miles of river deepening near Portland (RM 94 to RM 104) was signaled to be completed by the fall of 2005. Current bid documents indicates several additional projects are being considered, one a deepening of the Columbia Slough (the bid was canceled between my first viewing of it 13 Nov 05 and 20 Nov 05) and others for ongoing maintenance work.

Funding for the project is complex and comes from a variety of sources, though all of them are public. Last year the president promised $15M for 2005 fiscal year (FY), though in final budgeting Congress approved only $9M. As of early November of 2005, Congress has approved $15M towards funding the project for 2006FY; it still requires presidential approval and an especially contentious budget process due to competing needs for funds such as Katrina disaster relief. The total project is estimated by the USACE to be around $150M (I have seen figures ranging from $138M to 150.5M) of which both the States of Washington and Oregon must fund $27.7M each. According to a July 15, 2005 Portland Business Journal report, “[m]ore than half of the approximate $148 million cost of the project has yet to be secured. ‘Seventy-nine million dollars have yet to be set aside,’ said Laura Hicks, Army Corps of Engineers project manager” (Strom). Additionally, initial project bids for recently completed work came in 69% above USACE estimates. The lowest bid was at least $12.5M over the project's $18.2M budget.

Who Benefits?

The deepwater ports that benefit directly from this project include those at Kalama, Longview, Vancouver, and Woodland in Washington and Portland and St Helens in Oregon. The regions that are generally supposed to utilize these port facilities include most of Oregon, most of Idaho, and a large portion of Washington—including Southwest Washington and the eastern farming areas of Spokane and Walla Walla. The USACE has estimated that the dredging investment, which includes all economic gains to the region, will provide a $1.66 return for every $1 spent, though critics have said that the Corps overestimates such figures and that $0.88 is closer to historic realities. The subject is too broad to discuss in this paper, but would be a good subject for consideration by others. However, only 54- 78% of the region’s goods utilizes the lower Columbia River for export shipping, and – 38- 62% for imports. The region’s forecast calls for those percentages to decrease, meaning that the Puget Sound will provide more and more of the hinterlands shipping needs: estimates are 55-68% for exports and 35-50% for imports. Increases in volume are due to conservative (3-5%) estimates of overall shipping increases.

Who is at Risk?

Some critics of the channel-deepening project are concerned that additional dredging will damage crab-fishing areas near Astoria, others that dredge materials are too toxic to be moved. Additional criticism is that dredging spoils dumped adjacent to the river will degrade existing land, damaging ecosystems used by humans and other species. Opponents also cite that deepening the channel will cause further harm to an already compromised salmon habitat that is in need of help rather than hurt. It is against these concerns that port authorities have continued to say that deepening the channel is of critical importance to the region’s economic wellbeing. They, along with generally ecologically minded politicians such as Senator Patty Murray of Washington and past Oregon Governor Kitzhaber, have supported the USACE’s efforts to deepen the channel. Against such oppositional viewpoints the question must be asked, what is to be gained by these 3-feet? Why do so many people want to make the river deeper?

The Business of Ports

The port’s charge is to maintain shipping routes and resources for an area, to champion and maintain shipping infrastructure. A port is necessarily a gateway for transit, an intersection of a variety of different kinds of shipping methods. Portland’s original strength lay in its situation at the confluence of two great waterways in a growing region. In the Willamette Valley was the richest farmland known to modern America and forests filled with extractable resources. A port has always needed a population to both serve as consumers and to provide resources—in terms of consuming imports and creating exports as well as providing labor for shipping. Historically the Port of Portland was the center of this northwest economic activity. But with the advent of rail, the focus of port viability started to shift. Rails connected markets and hinterlands to the new towns of Tacoma and Seattle; shippers could benefit by avoiding the treacherous Columbia bar and enjoying protected harbors in Puget Sound. The favor bestowed on Portland started changing during the golden age of rail. It continued to change when, in the 1960s, the Port decided it would no modernize its ship handling operations and instead continued to cater to bulk load barges, using old tried and true methods for cargo handling: hoisting non-standardized bundles on deck using basic equipment and an enormous amount of physical labor.

Ports in Seattle and Tacoma modernized to take advantage of the new containerized shipping; they embraced containerized shipping early. They poured money into port infrastructure that used modern technology by quickly moving homogonous shipping containers off ships and onto trucks or rails that in turn moved goods to markets overseas or the hinterland. Naturally deep water, a sheltered harbor, a growing populace, and closer proximity to open seas and Asian markets brought prominence to the Puget Sound for containerized shipping. Portland now finds itself as a minor or second-tier port in the United States. It is generally ranked 15th in terms of both value and scale of containerized cargo and sees less shipping trade than do smaller populations such as Savannah and Charleston. Worldwide the top US shipping capitals are Los Angels, Long Beach (LALB), New York/New Jersey (NYNJ), Oakland, Charleston, Hampton Roads (Virginia), Tacoma, and Seattle. These ports share some characteristics, but not all. Charleston is 16 miles from the sea and recently completed 45-foot channel-deepening project. NY/NJ has a 40-foot deep channel with a project underway to deepen it to 50-feet by 2014, as well as vast infrastructure improvements. Tacoma and Seattle have naturally deep ports that don’t require dredging. LALB finds itself unable to keep up with demand and has yet to correct its cargo loading problems, it is still the dominant port in America; the combined throughput of the twin ports accounts for the majority of goods passing through US ports.

How Does the Port of Portland Compare?

Portland finds itself in positions shared by other upriver ports like Philadelphia, once a shipping empire, but now struggling to compete in a world that has been markedly and steadfastly consolidating shipping operations since the 1990s. Philadelphia is 103 miles upriver on the Delaware and has struggled with competing with more accessible ports, namely Baltimore and New York. As early as the 1980s its changing fortunes were gathering notice and generating concern. One of its responses was an interesting, though controversial, program to build a new type of ship, one that would travel shallower and faster between the east coast and Europe. FastShip, conceived by engineers at MIT and now privately held, is supported by the US government—but appears to have stalled in its design and implementation. Boston is another struggling port, which like San Francisco saw its shipping prominence eclipsed by other ports and turned some of its resources into redeveloping real estate opportunities. Another example, though not stateside, is Glasgow, Scotland. It too has redesigned its ports and wharfs to create new economic development opportunities.

Today’s preeminent ports are all indicative of Asia’s importance and China’s expansion in world trade: Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Busan are the top ports of 2004. This Asian dominance extends not only to port size and capacity, overtaking historic shipping capitals such as Rotterdam and Hamburg (now rated 7th and 9th worldwide), but also ship building. China has visions of being the largest ship-builder; they would demote Korea from holding that position, which had similarly stripped traditional European ship-builders of that title in recent years. These super-ports have seen increases in trade brought on by expanded globalization and the super-sizing of container ships. Shipping is an incredibly competitive field and the industry found that increasing ship capacity could increase profitability—though some researches say that globalization and strategic partnering have rather induced over-capacity and lower profit margins—yet still larger ships are being built. Ships that used to be constrained by the size of the Panama Canal (Panamax) are now moving back and forth (pendulum shipping) from Asia to the West Coast or from Europe to the East Coast. (North-south trade routes to Africa, South America, and Oceania are not nearly as dominant in capacity or value.) Larger ships on these routes can only call on deep-water ports. Generally called Post-Panamax, they also include Super-Post-Panamax, as well as ships currently in design that I will designate as Mega-Post-Panamax. A large Super-Post-Panamax ship docked at Oakland in May of 2005.

"[T]he 8,200 TEU […] CGM Hugo… is 1,096 feet long, longer than three football fields; 140.4 feet wide, 30 feet wider than the Panama Canal; with a draft of 47.6 feet when fully loaded. The Hugo is able to carry enough cargo to completely fill a 1 million-square-foot regional shopping center with TVs, toys, clothes, shoes, and other products stacked eight feet high. "

Ships like the Hugo, nearly as tall as the Chrysler Building in New York (1046-feet), will never be able to dock at the Port of Portland or any of the deep-water ports on the Columbia River. Dredging to 43-feet will generally allow only smaller Post-Panamax ships to travel upriver. Whether the over-crowding experienced by LALB moves some shipping to Columbia River remains to be seen, though additonal traffic--expected last year--did not materialize. Even the region’s 2002 study on what channel deepening will do for the area’s economy expects the moderate forecasted gains for both exports and imports will fall-off after 10 years.

Most West Coast container ports (LALB, Seattle, Tacoma, and Vancouver BC) have or are in the process of obtaining (as is Oakland) channel depths of 50+ feet of water depth under MLLW conditions. Container traffic in the Lower Columbia River is currently constrained by the existing channel dimension of 40-feet and will also likely be constrained with an improved channel depth (43-feet). The forecasts provided […] assume that Portland will gain market share in the first decade and then experience a decline in market share in the period 2010 through 2030 under with and without channel deepening.

Doug O’Keefe with the Transportation Division of Canada, in analyzing the affects of large ship commerce and port infrastructure cautions “before making the substantial investment required to attract super post-Panamax ships, ports and their intermodal partners must now consider the risk that the industry may decide to limit its investment in this technology.” He also noted that a “study by Luberoff and Wider of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government concluded that U.S. ports often did not exercise sound business practice in funding multimodal facilities and routinely shifted the risks of such investments to tax payers.”

A Different Question

Columbia River’s ports’ hope to remain viable has as much to do with competition between states for limited trade access as well as intermodal (train and truck as well as ship) capacity and connections, with its attendant high-tech shipping solutions, as it does channel depth. A more suitable question for Oregon and Southwest Washington residents—even though it is a much more controversial concept than dredging—would be if the deepwater Columbia River ports should remain upriver at all or should Oregon and Washington build a new port closer to the mouth of the Columbia to meet future shipping needs? Would manipulating a large but discrete acreage--encompassing many nautical and land miles--for a new port be better than damaging 103-nautical miles of river and coastlines? Would the cities of Portland and Vancouver be better off recreating and revitalizing river property into other uses and easing the strain on Clark County and Metro’s Urban Growth Boundary than in promising prosperity that should only be seen as a finger in the dike of diminishing port prospects.


Glossary

Clearances—Beam refers to width of a ship and is generally discussed in terms of now many containers fit in a row. For the discussion in this paper beam is not included, though it has great significance on clearance as well as dock infrastructure such as gantry crane capacity. Post-Panamax-Cranes cost between $6-10M and are a significant expense. Draft (or the English draught) refers to the clearance below the water, not the overall height of the vessel. Required clearances are subject to tides

Hinterland—geographical areas that are outside larger cities whose economic resources flow towards the regional economic centers. You can say they are similar to watersheds serving a river system.

Intermodal—referencing the variety of shipping activities required to move containerized cargo. Those are ship, rail, and truck, all capable of carrying the unified container modules.

Panamax—Refers to ships sized to pass the Panama Canal. The canal is 1001 feet long (305 m) x 110 feet wide (or 33.5 m “beam) x 41 feet draft (12.5 min). Panamax ships are generally 951 l x 106 with a 39.4 draft and carry about 4,500 TEU.

TEU—The unit of measure describing the capacity of a containerized ship. It stands for “twenty-foot equivalent unit”, which is the standard length of a 20-foot container, thus one such container would be (1) TEU, and a 40-foot container, the size typically in use today is (2) TEU. The standard container is generally 8 x 8 x 20 in feet.