Engineers and inspectors descended into the emptied lock at the Chickamauga Dam on Monday to help assess how much longer the crumbling concrete chamber can act as a river passageway for most of East Tennessee.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is spending more than $3.7 million this year to shore up the 70-year-old lock, which already has more extra supports and instruments than any river lock in the world. But with funding stalled for the half-finished replacement lock at the dam, repair costs and safety worries over the existing lock are growing.
"There is a very real risk that, if we don't keep working on the new lock, we may be forced to permanently shut down the old lock before the new one is finished," said Cline Jones, executive director for the Tennessee River Valley Association, which represents the shipping industries that use the Tennessee River.
"It's more likely than not that the condition of the lock would force its closure and that will be an economic disaster and job killer because it would cut off 318 miles of navigable waterways," he said.
The lock is closed through Aug. 16 while crews address problems with "concrete growth" caused by a chemical reaction between the rock used to build the lock and the river where it sits. Since the lock opened in 1940, the lock chamber has expanded 12 inches in length and 4 inches in height, causing widespread cracking and valve damage.
The corps will reopen the lock next month, but a similar four-week shutdown of the lock is planned again next summer for further tests and repairs.
The corps has spent nearly $30 million since 1988 to address the concrete growth problems in the lock, including the installation of 347 tension anchors through the chamber to add stability and dozens of instruments to measure the growth and potential problems in the concrete.
"This is the most heavily instrumented lock in the world with more than 450 instruments that we monitor," said Doug DeLong, the Corps of Engineers' project manager for the existing lock at the Chickamauga Dam.
It's also a heavily used lock. Last year, about 1.6 million tons of cargo moved through the Chickamauga lock, down from 2.3 million tons before the recession. But the commodities that move through the Chickamauga lock come from 17 states and move an average of 1,400 miles.
"A closure there would impact the heartland of the country," Mr. Jones said. "On the other hand, the day the new lock opens, you're likely to have new economic growth above Chickamauga that has not been there before because of the size and condition of that lock."
Extra time and costs
The Tennessee Valley Authority, which built the original lock, and the Army Corps of Engineers, which operates it, began developing plans in the 1980s to replace the Chickamauga lock with one that's more in line with the size of other locks downstream on the Tennessee River.
When design work began on the new lock in the 1990s, TVA estimated that problems with the existing lock would make it inoperable by 2010. Mr. DeLong said aggressive maintenance has extended the life of the lock, although engineers are unsure exactly how many more years the crumbling chamber may operate safely.
The new lock, which was authorized by Congress in 2003, originally was expected to be completed by now and to cost under $300 million. But delays in funding and schedules could nearly double the cost of the new lock and have delayed its completion indefinitely.
Nearly $200 million has already been spent over the past decade to relocate roads and bridges, to build support walls, valves and gates and to erect a temporary coffer dam. Bill DeBruyn, resident engineer for the new Chickamauga lock, estimates the new lock will require another 51/2 years to complete once construction begins on the actual lock, which will be constructed within the lock.
But for now, there isn't enough money to pay for more than the corps' top priority: replacing the heavily used Olmsted lock and Dam on the Ohio River in Illinois.
"As a nation, we haven't adequately funded those projects that we have authorized and said are important and, as a consequence, the costs of those projects has gone up," said Stephen Little, president of the Paducah, Ky.-based Crounse Corp., and chairman of the Inland Waterways Users Board.
"When you stretch out projects, you end up paying more by commissioning and then decommissioning staff and equipment, and operations and maintenance costs rise as the work extends longer," he said.
The Inland Waterways Users Trust Fund, financed by a 20 cents-per-gallon tax on diesel fuel for barges, doesn't have enough matching money left to fund more work on either the Chickamauga lock or the new Kentucky lock on the Tennessee River near Paducah, this year or next. The work on those new locks this year was funded from the $4.6 billion the corps received from the $787 billion stimulus package adopted by the U.S. Congress in February 2009.
The trust fund has been depleted by the recession-induced drop in barge shipments, which cut tax collections going into the trust fund, and cost overruns at the Olmsted lock and Dam, where costs have tripled since the project began in 1996. The corps originally projected that the replacement lock and dam at Olmsted would cost $775 million. More than $2 billion has since been spent on the project, which is yet to be completed.
To restart the Chickamauga lock construction any time in the next few years, a new funding formula must be adopted as part of a new Water Resources and Development Act, which was last updated in 2007.
The waterway users board wants the corps to finish existing projects before starting new ones and has agreed to support up to a 29 cent-a-gallon diesel fuel tax on their barges to fund completion of major projects. The higher fuel tax and change in the funding formula for locks would help sustain the new lock construction at Chickamauga.
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