Memphis bridge supporting its weight in doubt
Closed river has 700 barges loaded with goods piling up
The first step in reopening the Interstate 40 bridge over the Mississippi River at Memphis is to make a temporary fix that will allow personnel and equipment to safely be on the span to make long-term repairs, the Arkansas Department of Transportation said Thursday.
Personnel from the Arkansas agency and its companion agency in Tennessee generated a computer model of the bridge that takes into account the damage and other bridge conditions as a way to test the effects of potential repairs, the agency said in a news release.
Thursday was the second full day that the bridge, a major river crossing for freight shipped by truck in the nation’s midsection, remained closed to traffic. The span was abruptly closed Tuesday after an inspection found a significant fracture in one of two 900-foot-long beams supporting the deck of one of the bridge spans.
Barge traffic under the bridge is also blocked.
The traffic disruptions will be felt well beyond Memphis, said Andrew Grobmyer, executive vice president of the Agriculture Council of Arkansas.
“While there are alternate bridges that allow surface transportation across the river, there will be significant congestion and disruption to the flow of people and goods as it is one of the busiest interstate corridors and serves as the crossroads of the United States,” he said Thursday.
The fracture in a load-bearing beam on the bridge compromised the span’s integrity, and its discovery during the inspection prevented a potential catastrophe, according to Lorie Tudor, the top official at the Arkansas Department of Transportation.
Even without the weight of vehicles, highway engineers are unsure the bridge can support itself, which is why barge traffic also has been halted on the river in the vicinity of the bridge.
That has left more than 700 barges stalled on the Mississippi River near Memphis, slowing the flow of everything from grains to metals to fuel on the key U.S. waterway.
The Mississippi River is the main artery for U.S. crop exports, with covered barges full of grain and soybeans floating to terminals in the Gulf of Mexico. Any sustained shutdown could also disrupt shipments out of the Gulf, although some goods can be sent on trains or diverted to ports along the U.S. Pacific Northwest.
A long shutdown could roil crop markets, where soybeans and corn futures have hit multiyear highs amid adverse weather in Latin America and a buying spree from China.
“The Ohio, the river north of Memphis has all this tonnage on it. They’re stuck,” said Bryan Day, executive director of the Port of Little Rock on the Arkansas River. “How’s that grain going to get down? How’s that fertilizer going to get up? How’s the oil going to move?”
If river traffic is halted for a long period of time, that means the grain “is going to go onto rail cars or trucks, and the prices to the consumer are going to go way up. The impact will be felt across the country. We on the river … are optimistic that it is an easier, quicker fix than we think.”
The Little Rock port has seen no impact from the closure so far. Virtually all of the barge traffic in and out of the port travels to and from New Orleans and other points south, Day said. The Arkansas River joins the Mississippi River well south of Memphis.
The Little Rock port and other ports on the Arkansas River could see more activity if barge traffic remains stalled on the Mississippi River, he said.
“That tonnage and those commodities will have to divert somewhere,” Day said. “If you think about the flood in 2019 when the upper Arkansas River was unusable, we had increased traffic in Little Rock, Pine Bluff and Helena.
“So if the upper Mississippi is unaccessible, there is a potential for rivers south of Memphis, like the Arkansas, to see increased tonnage as people look for ways to divert commodities. However, it’s also possible that instead of doing that, they just offload in the Gulf and put it on a rail car or a truck and just avoid the river at all costs.”
There was no immediate word Thursday about when barge traffic could resume on the river.
But Arkansas transportation officials said they “discussed the current situation and risk factor of reopening the river to barge traffic with the Coast Guard so that they could evaluate and decide if it is safe to resume operations in that waterway,” according to the news release.
Nationally, the bridge closure has been used to bolster attempts to reach a deal in Washington on infrastructure spending.
President Joe Biden is pushing his $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan, an investment in infrastructure that goes beyond roads and bridges to include veterans hospitals and child care centers, among other things. Republicans have countered with a more modest bill tohave taling $800 billion.
The bridge is “an excellent example of why we need the American Jobs Plan,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday. “There are bridges around the country that are decades overdue in being repaired, in being fixed, in ensuring that people traveling — they’re going to work, they’re taking their kids to school — are up to the standard that we should in this country in one of the most competitive and industrious countries in the world.”
Infrastructure spending resonates beyond Washington politics.
“This does remind us all of the importance of infrastructure to the economy, and we do hope it leads to much needed investments in modernizing all forms of infrastructure from the federal government,” Grobmyer said. “These systems allow for commerce to flow, and they need to be in working order and in condition to meet the needs of the economy today and in the future.”
Meanwhile, the Arkansas transportation agency announced Thursday that it has established a web page devoted to developments on the closing of the I-40 bridge. It can be found at https://www. ardot.gov/divisions/public-information/40-ms-river-bridge/.