Following the Intracoastal Folly: What is happening to keep the waterway running

It would seem the concerns of the cruisers are finally making headway in the dredging of the ICW. Small portions of funds have finally been allotted to keeping the waterway open. Although it is a start, please make sure to follow the news on the waterway. There are still many areas that need to be improved to keep not only commercial traffic running but also private boating.

Click here to see more information on the ICW problem.

The ICW (for Intracoastal Waterway), a 1,095-mile highway of water stretching from Norfolk to Miami, is dying.

The ICW provides shippers, fishers, and sailors a sheltered route from the storms of the Atlantic as well as a scenic byway for yachts and pleasure boating. It is a key route for barging petroleum products, sand & gravel, agricultural products, building materials and steel. It also gives hard-pressed coastal regions a tourism industry that has allowed many small towns to survive and a few to thrive. However, the Waterway's budget proposes to spend approximately $750,000 on the ICW in the 2005 fiscal year. The estimate to clear the entire ICW, North to South, is in the $55 millions. Although this new allocation of funds is a welcome sight, it is just the beginning of what is needed to make the ICW whole again.

The waters of the coastal Carolinas are notoriously shallow, and tidal forces deposit sand in numerous inlets causing these channels to silt over, blocking the heaviest loads and threatening to send the Intracoastal Waterway into disuse.

Federal data shows that the waterway is effectively closed to shipping at places along North Carolina's coast such as Lockwoods Folly Inlet, and is severely restricted at other points.

In recent years, shippers and other waterway users have waged a campaign with the federal government over the maintenance and dredging budget. Although federal spending is rising, the amount spent on waterways has steadily declined. In 2001, North and South Carolina's portion of the waterway got $11.4 million for dredging; last year the two states' waterway sections got $3.6 million. Next year, they will get nothing unless Congress decides otherwise.

Another notorious spot is Lockwoods Folly Inlet in Brunswick County. Here the waterway has shoaled to 6 feet at low tide. A trouble spot is near the New River just below Camp Lejeune, where water depth had thinned to 4 feet last fall. Shippers also report trouble spots where the Alligator River meets Albemarle Sound, as well as thin water near Carolina Beach Inlet, Beaufort, SC, and Jekyll Island, GA.

Boaters and shippers often are forced to stop and wait for the tide to come in before attempting to navigate the waterways.

One reason for the lack of adequate funding is that the ICW is regarded as a low priority by the government. The administration's Office of Management and Budget, OMB, examined the shipping statistics recently and decided not to propose maintenance funds for waterways with less than one billion ton-miles of cargo (a ton-mile is one ton of cargo shipped one mile). The ICW's five-year average is about 600 million ton-miles leaving the waterway woefully short of qualifying for funding.

However, only commercial shipping is being considered. The formula does not include commercial fishing vessels moving on the waterway. Nor does it include construction vessels or empty barges, or the long parade of pleasure craft that make pilgrimages twice a year between Florida and Maine, Massachusetts and the Chesapeake.

Boaters can spend as much as $500 on a two-night stop for fuel, parts, dockage, restaurants, groceries, entertainment and shopping and with 16,000 pleasure boats moving up and down the waterway and stopping every 25 miles or so for the night, the total economic impact is significant.

Dozens of members of Congress from coastal areas have recently formed a Congressional Waterways Caucus to tackle some of these issues, including the government's failure to recognize the benefit of most of the waterway traffic.

Many shipping companies are fuming over the lack of funding because they pay high federal fuel fees for waterborne transportation, but none of it helps the ICW. In 1978, Congress created the Inland Waterways Trust Fund to pay for new construction on the nation's navigable waterways. Every shipping company pays 20 cents per gallon of fuel used into the fund, plus another 4.3 cents per gallon to help retire the federal deficit.

But there's a catch: The money cannot be used for maintenance, only for new construction or major rehabilitation. Not a penny of the trust fund -- which has a surplus of hundreds of millions of dollars -- goes to the ICW, and attempts to open up the fund for maintenance have gone nowhere.

Shippers, recreational boaters and cruising lines all worry that government neglect of the waterway will eventually cause it to fall into disrepair and force traffic out of the waterway and into the open ocean, where the costs of accidents, towing and rescues are going to be high.

AIWW (Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway Assn.) is asking that everyone contact your members of Congress today and ask them to provide emergency funds for the US Corps of Engineers, Wilmington District to dredge this area. Locate your congressional representatives and please phone, email or fax your message. Members of Congress need to hear from their constituents about this situation before it becomes worse.

We will keep you posted regarding the issues surrounding the waterway.

Information for this article was gathered from various sources including the Charlotte Observer's article Running Aground on the Intracoastal Waterway by Jack Betts.