Port asks for a bump in funds for dredging
Harvey’s damages add urgency to push for federal money
Torrential rains that washed mud into the Houston Ship Channel some eight months ago are now bolstering Port Commissioners’ call for increased federal funding to maintain the waterway, with chairman Janiece Longoria citing Hurricane Harvey to rally support during a dredge task force meeting on Monday.
She reminded the crowd how the waterway closed for five business days, and the result was a nationwide shortage of gasoline and jet fuel.
“It’s when we have one of these extraordinary events that we rec- ognize how important we are to the nation’s economic and energy security,” she said. “… All of us need to carry those messages to our legislative and federal delegation.”
But dredging isn’t just a posthurricane chore. It’s a year-round necessity affected by federal funding shortfalls. Longoria said no more than 10 percent of the
Houston Ship Channel is at its authorized depth and width at any given time, making catastrophes like Hurricane Harvey especially damaging.
Longoria and Port Houston Executive Director Roger Guenther went to Washington to request $923 million for post-Harvey dredging and resiliency projects, among other things.
That could include advanced maintenance where portions of the Ship Channel are deepened, creating basins to catch sediment.
The Turning Basin, in particular, has imposed draft restrictions on ships for more than 1,300 days. It was still recovering from the Memorial Day Flood in 2015 and Tax Day Flood in 2016 when Harvey hit.
The most recent storm caused draft restrictions in essentially every section of the Ship Channel. Of the two remaining sections with post-Harvey draft restrictions, one is set to wrap up dredging in midMay and the other in October.
Mark Vincent, Port Houston director of channel development, said the Army Corps of Engineers used an existing pot of emergency management funds, unrelated to what Port Houston requested while in Washington, to dredge the waterway after Harvey.
If additional money comes from Congress, the Port Authority would like the Army Corps to put those funds toward resiliency efforts.
To help with more routine maintenance, Port Houston is lobbying for changes to the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund, which taxes import cargo to collect money for maintaining ship channels. However, not all of that money is being used for waterway maintenance.
“Our channel has not been maintained to its proper depth and width in many, many years,” Guenther said. “And we need that to happen.”
Some years, he said, port customers pay $100 million into that fund and the Ship Channel will receive $30 million of maintenance dredging. Fully maintaining the waterway requires some $50 million to $60 million each year.
Jim Kruse, director of the Center for Ports and Waterways at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, said few U.S. ports get the maintenance dredging needed to fully maintain their waterways.
“The ports have been putting on a really big push over the last few years to force Congress to spend that money on dredging,” he said.
Losing 1-foot draft can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The impact accelerates as a waterway gets shallower, as there are more vessels with drafts of 35 to 40 feet than with drafts of 40 to 45 feet.
It’s the ship owners, vessel operators and freightbill payers who feel the bulk of this impact.
Monday’s dredge task force meeting wasn’t limited to present concerns. Port commissioners discussed future deepening and widening projects to accommodate larger vessels now sailing the oceans and coming through the expanded Panama Canal.
A four-year study is set to wrap up in December 2019 and could go before Congress in an authorization bill in 2020. The study could request widening the Galveston Bay portion of the Houston Ship Channel to 700 feet from the current 530 feet.
It could also seek to deepen the waterway starting at the Beltway 8 bridge and traveling roughly 8 miles upstream to 46.5 feet, or 5 feet deeper than it is now. The waterway starting at the Loop 610 bridge up to the Turning Basin could be deepened by 4 feet, to 41.5 feet.
The Turning Basin was last authorized for deepening during President Harry Truman’s administration, which spanned 1945 to 1953.
Guenther said the widening project will be essential for maintaining twoway traffic on the ship channel.
And he said Port Houston is exploring the idea of helping pay for the expansion, if needed, to ensure its completion.
“Ships are getting bigger. They’re getting longer; they’re getting wider,” he said. “So the need to do that is critical to the efficient movement of vessels in and out of our port.”