Between Lake Superior and the Great Lakes of North America lies a narrow canal, just 1.6 miles long. Each year some 10,000 ships pass through the Soo Locks of St Marys Fall canal, nearly all the iron ore used in the US passes through and millions of American jobs depend on them staying open. But age and neglect could soon put those jobs under threat.
Consider a day in the life of the average American. It’s an existence that rides upon a figurative highway of steel – steel appliances, steel cutlery and tools and, most important to the US economy, steel-bodied automobiles. That’s a lot of steel, and most of the ore it’s made of comes from mines in Minnesota and northern Michigan.
Now the transportation network that connects manufacturers with the raw materials they need may be hanging by a thread, suggests a Department of Homeland Security report unearthed by the Detroit Free Press. The report focuses on the economic impacts of a shutdown of the nearly 50-year-old Poe Lock – a vital waterway transportation link for huge cargo ships that carry raw materials and supplies back and forth across the Great Lakes – and says that a six-month closure of the lock could cost America 11 million jobs, crippling automakers and other manufacturers in the process.
“The Soo Locks represent a critical link in the steel supply chain, giving them a disproportionate influence on vehicle manufacturing and the entire steel industry,” Karl Brauer, an analyst at Kelley Blue Book, an automotive industry research firm, said.
More than half of America’s locks are over 50 years old, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, which estimates some $3.6tn is needed to repair the US’s antiquated waterways.
Few locks are more vital than Poe Lock, the largest among the four US army corps of engineers-operated Soo Locks, which connect Lake Superior to the lower Great Lakes. The water level in Lake Superior is more than 20ft higher than Lake Huron, and requires the use of locks to move ships from one lake to the other without having to encounter a treacherous mile of rapids between the two. At 1,200ft long, 100ft wide and 32ft deep, Poe is the only lock along that section of the St Marys river that can accommodate the dozen massive lake freighters that can each carry nearly 70,000 tons of iron ore from mine to mill.
Source: The Guardian