PORTLAND, Ore. — Traffic on part of the Columbia River was shut down Friday after a barge hit a gate at the navigation lock of the John Day Dam.
The lock raises and lowers vessels so they can get around the dam.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said a towboat pulling a barge was moving upstream late Thursday when it struck the gate and pulled it free of its housing on the upstream side.
The accident caused significant damage, but no injuries were reported.
“The mere fact that the gate is not operational is significant in our mind,” said Matt Rabe, spokesman for the corps. “Several things have to happen for a gate to come out.”
An investigation is under way to determine the cause and ways to put it back into operation.
The corps says it has a plan that may reopen shipping traffic through the lock by Monday. A contractor will use a crane to remove the damaged portion of the lock, allowing crews to inspect the area more closely.
If the damage isn’t too bad, a bulkhead vessel will be used as a temporary gate until a permanent repair can be made. The corps says this procedure has been used in the past.
The lock was already scheduled to be shut down March 8-22 for annual maintenance. Rabe said the accident may put it out of commission through the end of the month.
However, the corps is investigating temporary solutions.
About 10 million tons of commodities and finished goods move along the Columbia River each year.
The shutdown will not affect all traffic on the river, such as shipping coming upriver from the mouth of the Columbia to Portland.
But it will affect river shipping that comes through the John Day Dam, near The Dalles. That includes all traffic between Portland and the Tri-Cities area of Washington state, as well as up the Snake River to Lewiston, Idaho.
Officials say the financial impact will not be clear until the severity of the damage and timeline for repairs is known.
“We are encouraged that the Corps of Engineers is looking into plans for repair and possible temporary solutions,” said Josh Thomas, spokesman for the Port of Portland. “We are hopeful river traffic will be resumed and we can conduct business as usual.”
The Port of Portland said much of the traffic through the lock is in agricultural goods, such as wheat and barley.
Jim Toomey, executive director of the Port of Pasco in southeast Washington, said the effect was lessened by the fact that a two-week outage was planned anyway.
In 1996, ice from a cold snap blocked river traffic, Toomey said. But since then, many shippers have turned to truck and rail as a substitute to the river.
But concerns remain.
“The other thing that’s troubling, in order to get products out of here, you have to have an empty box. I’m worried about empty containers coming up,” Toomey said. “There’s a scarcity of them out there anyway.”
Toomey estimated that 70 percent of the containers that arrive at Portland and Puget Sound ports are shipped to inland states.
“That’s another logistical piece of this puzzle, a second-order impact associated with losing the river for a couple of extra weeks, assuming it’s only a couple of extra weeks,” he said.
The Port of Lewiston already had been rushing to move containers ahead of the scheduled locks closure, Manager Dave Doeringsfeld said.
But Doeringsfeld now has full containers waiting in Lewiston, which were going to head downriver before the scheduled closure. And he has empty containers stuck in Portland, which he’d hoped to ship up as soon the lock reopened.
Doeringsfeld said he hopes the corps will consider delaying that closure now in light of the incident. If not, he said, “This may do away with everyone’s best laid plans.”
The barge involved in Thursday’s incident, which was hauling grain, remained stuck in the lock. But the corps said it would be able to move the barge soon.
“For the time being, she is a guest of ours,” Rabe said.
The dam itself is nearly half a century old and in need of millions of dollars of repairs. The corps said accident does not affect the structure of the dam itself.
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