The following article appeared in the Sunday, November 8th Bat City Times
by Kathryn Lynch-Morin
Continuing a five-year trend, 2009 proved commercial shipping on the Saginaw River is still on a downturn.
However, dock owners and shipping analysts agree that recent dredging is saving the river as a shipping port.
Todd Shorkey, who reports vessel passages to the online group boatnerd.com, said as of Oct. 31 this year there were 141 commercial vessel passages making deliveries to docks along the Saginaw River.
That’s down from 176 vessel passages in 2008, and down from a five-year average of 217 vessel passages per year. About 296 vessel passages were made during the same time period in 2005.
“So, it is quite easy to see that 2009 has not been a good year for shipping on the Saginaw River,” Shorkey said. “There has been a downward trend each year for the past five years.”
A poor economy gets some of the blame, lowering demand for the high-volume products moved by lake freighters.
Despite the decline, many companies in the Great Lakes Bay Region still rely on shipping as a means of transportation.
William G. Webber, president of the Saginaw River Alliance — a group of 22 companies that use the river for moving materials — attributes a lot of shipping traffic this year to materials needed for construction work on road projects such as Interstate 675 in Saginaw County and Center Avenue in Bay County.
“State highway work in Bay City and Saginaw have been the largest movers of construction stone,” said Webber, who owns Sargent Docks and Terminal Inc., which has facilities in Essexville and Saginaw.
According to Shorkey, the Wirt Stone Dock in Bay City had the most traffic in 2009 with 29 deliveries, followed by the Wirt Stone Dock in Saginaw with 27 deliveries and the Bay Aggregates dock in Bangor Township with 25 deliveries.
Even though the stone docks saw the most traffic this year, Webber said stone sales are very slow because of the economy.
Construction at Hemlock Semiconductor Group in Saginaw County’s Thomas Township, in addition to Great Lakes Bay Regional agriculture, also contributed to the need for shipping traffic. Webber cited Michigan Sugar Co. as a strong base with its needs for kiln limestone, coal, potash, urea and other fertilizers. He said the POET Biorefining ethanol plant in Caro also helped the river shipping industry with its need for pot ash.
Dredging projects on the Saginaw River began in May and removed more than 200,000 cubic yards in an area from Bay City south to Saginaw.
“Dredging has saved the Saginaw River,” Webber said. “We can now turn ships and have removed the worst shoals. Next, we will be able to deepen the channel, which will result in tremendous shipping efficiencies.”
A shoal is an area of shallow water that serves as a navigation hazard to ships.
More than $4 million has poured in to the dredging project so far and $5 million has been spent to create a dredged material disposal facility on the Bay-Saginaw county line.
Another $3.4 million is earmarked by the federal government to dredge the river in five spots next year between the Sixth Street turning basin and Saginaw Bay. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers expects to remove 339,000 cubic yards from the bay and 107,500 cubic yards from the bottom of the river.
Jim Koski, Saginaw County Public Works commissioner, said the dredging project will lead to confidence and investing in Saginaw River shipping.
“It was really hard to get somebody to invest in the Saginaw River, but now we are the safest inland port on the Great Lakes,” Koski said. “Now we can go out and say we’ve got a port that will be here 75 to 100 years from now.”
The Saginaw News contributed to this report.
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