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Tuesday, January 6, 2015
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Corps Releases Draft Environmental Assessment for Lock Closure
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| Upper St Anthony Falls | Olivia Dorothy |
In December, the St. Paul District of the Army Corps of
Engineers released the draft environmental assessment for the Upper St. Anthony
Falls lock closure. This assessment is
required under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which outlines how
federal agencies engage the public as they determine projects and programs that
will have an impact on natural resources.
NEPA requires agencies to consider different project alternatives and
document how each of those alternatives will impact the environment and that
information must be shared with the public. Any public response must be taken into
consideration by the agency before the preferred project alternative can move
forward. The public may comment on the
lock closure and respond to the environmental assessment until January 23, 2015.
The lock closure was mandated last summer by Congress in
response to public concerns about the spread of aquatic invasive species like
silver carp. St. Anthony Falls has
historically been a barrier to northern migration of fish. Early records indicate that only a fraction of
native Mississippi River fish species are found north of the falls. But the lock opens the channel and could
facilitate the spread of the dramatic flying fish into Minnesota’s popular
lakes.
The lock will close June 10, and the environmental
assessment considers three alternatives:
- No action. This alternative would leave the lock in operation. This option is required to be considered under the NEPA, but for this project it isn’t viable because it would violate the Congressional mandate
- Leave the lock closed. The lock is closed now because ice and winter whether prohibits river traffic from moving.
- Open the lock in the spring and permit traffic until the mandatory closure June 10.
Even though the assessment concludes that leaving the lock
closed is a slightly better environmental option, the Corps prefers the third
option, to open the lock for navigation traffic until the mandatory closure
date in June. This option would allow
two business that transport scrap metal and aggregates, like sand and gravel,
to operate on the river in the spring. This
option delays some of the inevitable economic impacts to local businesses associated
with the lock closure. But the Corps
doesn’t provide any figures on the federal taxpayer money that could be saved
if the lock remained closed.
The Corps also omits any substantial discussion on the longer-term
impacts, like the cost to operate and maintain the lock for high water events
when it must be open to prevent flooding and the need to prevent the lock from
deteriorating into a safety hazard. In
meetings the Corps has stated that this will be considered in a disposition
study. But to improve the public understanding
of the process, the Corps should include a discussion on their plans to do a
disposition study. The Corps needs to
explain why a broader array of project alternatives, economic costs, and
environmental factors aren’t considered in the assessment.
The assessment also includes faulty statistics on fuel
efficiency and air pollution impacts between transportation sectors that were
provided by the navigation industry. Since
the early 1990s, independent studies have shown that railroads, especially
unit-trains (those really long trains) are, in most instances, the most fuel
efficient mode of transportation. On the Mississippi River above the Missouri
River, barges averaged 436 revenue ton-miles per gallon between 2007 and 2009. Compared to rail in the region, river
navigation is less efficient than non-unit and unit trains, which obtain 431
and 596 revenue ton-miles per gallon respectively.[1] And a study on the Illinois River showed that
trucks were less polluting than barges in some instances.[2]
The Corps will need to make these corrections in their final
environmental assessment, which will be out soon because the NEPA requirements
must be complete before the lock is closed in June. You can review the 30 page assessment here
and submit comments here.
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