Mississippi River Facts
Did You Know . .
A full tow of barges on the Upper Mississippi River is 3 barges wide and 5 barges long.
The tow is a 1/4 mile in length, the pilot, who navigates from the pilot house 3 stories above the water,
has a blind spot of 1000 feet in front of the barge head. This means he is actually steering his tow to a point
a half mile in front of him.
Each individual barge holds 1500 tons, the equivalent of 15 railroad cars or 58 semi trailers.
A full tow of 15 barges carries the equivalent of 225 railroad cars or 870 semi trailers.
Barge transportation is the most energy efficient form of bulk transportation available. The chart below shows how far one ton of bulk product can be carried on one gallon of fuel for each of the 3 major conveyances.
Source: U.S. DOT Maritime Administration
Barges pay a user tax of 20 cents per gallon of fuel. This money is deposited in the Inland Waterways Trust
Fund (IWTF) at the U.S. Treasury. The money is then used to pay 50% of improvements to the waterways. Taxpayers
pay the remaining amount.
Source: www.tenntom.org
The .20 per gallon tax generates about $100 million dollars per year and $15 million in interest.
Source: www.tenntom.org
The towboats that you see on the Upper Mississippi River cost around $1000 per horsepower. Many of the towboats on the upper river are 5000 horsepower, bringing the cost up to $5,000,000.
Barges are about $225,000 each for an open dry cargo hopper barge to $750,000 and up for a tank or liquid barge, depending on the type of equipment that is onboard. Source: www.tenntom.org
To ship one ton of grain from St. Paul, MN to New Orleans (2000 Miles) is about $14. This means a full tow (15 Barges) would cost $315,000.
The main commodities transported by the barges are grain - corn, wheat, barley, oats, and rye. Other products include scrap iron, coal, petroleum products, salt, fertilizers, cement, sulfur, sugar, and dehydrated molasses.
As you can see by this picture, the front of the barge is lower in the water, indicating that the front is being filled first.
An average of 175 million tons of freight are shipped each year on the Upper Mississippi .
A lock and dam system was designed and built in the 1930's to improve commerce on the river. The lock and dams were designed, built, and are maintained by the Army Corp of Engineers.
There are 29 lock and dams on the Upper Mississippi River allowing for navigation from Cairo, IL to Saint Paul, Minnesota a total distance of 854 miles.
In times of drought, before the dams were built, you could walk across parts of the Upper Mississippi.
The lock and dams maintain a minimum water depth of 9 foot, allowing for navigation even in a dry year.
The locks act like an elevator to raise or lower your boat from the water level on one side of the dam to the level on the other side.
Lock and Dam #7 at Dresbach, MN
The lock at L and D 7, the first one north of our home port, has a lift of 7-8 feet. It takes 3.6 million gallons of water to raise or lower your boat this amount. Total time required for lockage of a houseboat is 15 minutes.
There is no charge to go through the locks.
On the average July day at Lock and Dam 7, the normal discharge (water flowing over the dam) is 28,000 cubic feet per second.
The river is marked with mile markers similar to an interstate highway. The markers measure the distance north of the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. The confluence is mile marker 0 and one mile north of that is mile 1.
Examples of two Daymarkers and mileage boards located at 691.6, 692.8, miles above the Ohio River.
The minimum depth of the navigation channel is 9.5 feet.
The draft (depth in water) of a full barge is 9 feet.
The draft of a Huck's Houseboat Rental boat is 18 inches. The bottom of the drives are 4 foot below the water.
La Crosse is the home of La Crosse City Brewery (formerly G. Heileman Brewing, brewers of Old Style, Pabst and Stroh beers).
(Note: Heileman was closed in August 1999, since then a new company - called La Crosse City Brewery- has been brewing beer at the Heileman facility). When in La Crosse try one of our local favorites, La Crosse City Light or La Crosse City Lager.
La Crosse City Brewery is home to the worlds largest six pack. This six pack contains 22,200 barrels of beer - enough to fill 7,340,796, twelve ounce cans. Placed end to end these cans would run 565 miles, enough to supply one person a six pack a day for 3,351 years.
La Crosse, with over 360 bars, is in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most bars per capita and also for the most bars on one street.
