Hidden deep below the surface of the Chesapeake Bay and the Patapsco River, stretching from Annapolis to Fort McHenry, is an underwater highway for the world's largest ships. It is 50 feet deep, 700 feet wide and 25 miles long, 7carved like a giant trough into the soft ;bottom of mud, sand and clay.
People in the shipping business say that channel is a big reason the port of Baltimore survives. While the evolving demands of the maritime trade have left much of the port outdated and empty, Baltimore's channels are as deep and roomy as nearly any on the East Coast today.
But they are expensive.
As a debate brews in Washington over how to pay the $550 million annual bill for maintaining the nation's harbors, officials in Baltimore fear their port's competitiveness could be at stake.
President Clinton and others want shipowners to pay for harbor maintenance -- they use the channels, and it's their huge vessels that make them necessary.
But in a port like Baltimore -- one struggling to maintain its position as an outpost for international trade -- officials say attracting business is already hard enough. And they fear that any extra cost to the ships could be just enough to scare them away for good.
"It's pitting one port against another," said Frank Hamons, director of harbor development for the Maryland Port Administration. "It could create a major problem here."
While major port cities like Seattle and Long Beach, Calif., enjoy natural harbors as deep as 70 feet, the shipping areas of the Chesapeake are essentially man-made. Engineers have been digging out Baltimore's waterways for more than two centuries.
With horse-drawn plows in the 1700s, or cranes, barges and mile-long pipelines today, man has created an artificial bottom specifically to accommodate bigger and longer ships.
The first publicly financed dredging project in Baltimore is believed to have been an effort in the 1780s to deepen the Inner Harbor to 9 feet -- enough for deep-keeled sailing ships. Today, even with 50-foot-deep channels, ships hauling coal and iron ore can come perilously close to scraping the bottom.
Money is the reason for the deeper channels. Experts estimate that each extra foot of depth allows a ship to carry 2,000 extra tons of cargo. At 50 feet -- deeper than New York and as deep as Norfolk, Va. -- Baltimore remains a competitive option for the world's largest ships.
But the dredging never ends.
Few U.S. ports demand the level of maintenance that the port of Baltimore does. Silt-laden water from the Susquehanna River flows south and settles just outside the mouth of the Patapsco River -- where fresh water meets salt water, and where two of Baltimore's primary channels converge.
Storms and ships' propellers are forever stirring up mud from the channel's banks, which then collects at the bottom and reduces the depth.
The Craighill, Brewerton and Fort McHenry channels are the main driveways to the port of Baltimore. Engineers recently reduced their maintained width from 800 feet to 700 feet to save money, but keeping them clear is a priority.
Still, the port also relies on channels near the bay's mouth and a network running north to the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, and all of them need to be kept clear.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spends about $26 million every year to maintain Baltimore's channels at their authorized depths, dredging away silt that can build as much as 4 feet a year in some places.
The cost of "maintenance dredging" in Baltimore and every other U.S. port has been paid since 1986 by a Harbor Maintenance Tax on all cargo shipped through the ports.
But last year, the U.S. Supreme Court declared a portion of that tax unconstitutional, and the World Trade Organization is challenging the rest. Anticipating a shortfall, Congress is looking for alternatives.
A fee on every ship
Clinton would impose a fee on every ship sailing into U.S. ports -- a type of toll on the waterways. No ports would be immune, not even those that do not require dredging at all. The fee could raise as much as $980 million a year, and would be distributed, as now, to the ports that need it the most.
But officials in the maritime trades say the new fee would add additional costs to ports already close to pricing themselves out of competition. Foreign ports such as Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Vancouver, British Columbia, already profit from the higher fees and tougher regulations of their U.S. counterparts.
Shipping channels don't just benefit ships, they argue, they keep U.S. ports competitive and benefit every finished product and raw material moved through the largest trade nation in the world. As such, the taxpayers should pay to keep them in shape.
And they fear the fee might affect some cities more than others.
Ports that handle a lot of inexpensive, bulk commodities like coal and grain, for instance, could be hurt the most because ships hauling those goods already have thin profits.
"Everybody in the industry hates this thing -- everybody," said Jean Godwin, executive vice president of the American Association of Port Authorities.
"A carrier could save tens of millions of dollars by going to Canada. Is that going to hurt a port like Baltimore? You bet."
Government officials might not agree on how to pay for it, but all agree dredging is crucial to the competitiveness and profitability of U.S. waterways. None of the proposals before Congress call for eliminating funds for dredging.
Veteran port officials in Baltimore remember what neglected dredging can mean for business.
When a 1976 state law declared all mud in the western Patapsco River contaminated, and prohibitted dumping it in the bay, port officials couldn't dredge until Hart-Miller Island was opened for dumping in the mid 1980s.
Every year the bay pilots had to reduce the maximum draft of vessels in the port -- thus reducing the amount of cargo the ships could carry and the amount of profit they could make.
"We've seen, historically, what can happen if you don't have a place to put that material," said Jeff McKee, operations manager for the Army Corp's Baltimore District.
Overall good
"What we tend to look for in these projects is transportation savings that accrue to the whole nation. The fact that Baltimore gets a lot of jobs out of it isn't enough -- we look for the benefit nationwide."
Most channels north of the Bay Bridge, where the natural depth can be as shallow as 18 feet or less, require maintenance dredging. Some sections of the bay in Virginia need dredging as well, but most of the lower Chesapeake is naturally deep enough for ships.
Every year, the Army Corp removes about 2.5 million cubic yards of mud and sand from the bay's channels, dumping it at Hart-Miller, a man-made island south of Middle River. And that only accounts for channel maintenance -- proposals to straighten and deepen the 35-foot channels north of Baltimore would require much more.
A survey boat operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers takes regular readings of the bay's channels, sweeping across them in 100-foot increments and taking several electronic depth measurements a second. The result is a map showing the depth of nearly every square foot, accurate within a few inches.
When the measurements show that silt is building in the channels, or "shoaling," the corps hires a dredging contractor to clean it out.
Engineers use three basic techniques to shave the water's bottom.
A hydraulic dredge churns up mud with a device like a giant egg-beater, then sucks it through a flexible hose onto a barge. A "hopper" dredge uses a similar technique, but pumps the dirt into the boat itself -- then cruises out to sea, opens doors on the hull and dumps the material under water.
The most common dredging technique in the Chesapeake Bay, however, is the clam-shell dredge -- little more than a barge and a crane.
Last Thursday morning, Kay Woodley was operating a clam-shell dredge near the Key Bridge for Great Lakes Dredge and Dock Co. The dredges operate seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and Woodley works 14 straight 12-hour shifts, then takes a week off. He's 56 years old, lives in Norfolk and has been dredging for 29 years.
26 cubic yards
With each drop of the steel jaws at the end of his crane, Woodley pulled up about 26 cubic yards of mud -- enough to fill two dumptrucks.
"It's pretty much the same thing all day," he said. "You pull up tires and things, find a lot of cars near piers. I dug up a body once in New York."
To shipping companies and port officials, every cubic yard counts.
Under ideal circumstances -- with no waves or current, and no necessary turns -- a ship needs only 2 feet or 3 feet of clearance on the sides and bottom. But such ideal circumstances exist only in theory.
Ships rarely point in straight lines, for one thing. A vessel sailing east against a southerly current, for instance, might sail sideways. A 1,000-foot ship that is 150 feet wide might actually need 200 feet of clearance because it can't sail straight.
Take that same ship around a turn and it needs even more clearance. Send two ships through the channel at the same time, and even Baltimore's 700-foot width can seem skimpy.
"Try that at night in the rain with a good wind," said Capt. Mike Watson, president of the Association of Maryland Pilots, who guide commercial ships through the Chesapeake. "We use every foot of those channels."
Clinton is expected to release the details of his dredge-financing proposal soon, and opponents already have a bill before Congress calling for maintenance dredging to be paid for entirely with tax dollars. With the financing uncertain, current projects are being paid for out of the federal budget.
With no impending crisis, few port officials look for the issue to be resolved quickly. But port officials in Maryland are lobbying against the proposal nonetheless.
"We're a port that has a very mixed set of commodities," said Hamons. "We have a fair amount of bulk cargo through our coal piers, and we have a good amount of higher-valued cargo, and any of them could be affected by this.
"It very quickly becomes obvious that this fee can't treat the different ports fairly, even though we're all engaged in the same kinds of businesses. It should be a federal responsibility."
Pub Date: 4/25/99