The delays hurt farmers and drive up retail food prices. That has led to backups and bottlenecks in shipping soybeans and other commodities on the river this week, with long lines of trucks waiting at loading facilities. Lower water levels mean that fewer barges can travel the river at any one time, and those that do must carry lighter loads than they otherwise would. Plaquemines Parish officials also have plans to use reverse osmosis machines to desalinate drinking water there.įor the agriculture industry, “the timing of this couldn’t be more inopportune,” said Mike Steenhoek, the executive director of the Soy Transportation Coalition. The sill will take about two weeks to complete, and the work may begin early next week, a corps spokesman, Ricky Boyett, said in an interview. In response, the Army Corps of Engineers announced last week that it planned to build a sill - something like a speed bump made of sediment - on the riverbed near Myrtle Grove, La., to keep salt water from threatening drinking supplies that are drawn from the river farther north. When the river’s flow dwindles, salty water from the Gulf of Mexico tends to creep upstream, underneath the fresh water. “Basically, we’re not seeing any heavy rainfall over the next several weeks to indicate that we would get any relief from low water conditions for the lower Mississippi,” he said. In a typical year, low water levels on the river begin to abate around early December, said Jeff Graschel, a National Weather Service hydrologist at the Lower Mississippi River Forecast Center in Slidell, La.
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