River commerce riding a wave
LR port’s tonnage way up, buoyed by business from pipe maker
Friday, November 6, 2009
Workers unload 80-foot-long pipes, bound for a Fayetteville Shale natural-gas project, from a barge Thursday at the Little Rock Port.
Photo by Stephen B. Thornton
Despite swollen rivers and an economic downtown, commerce along the Arkansas River is barging ahead, already surpassing last year’s tonnage.
Boosted in part by demand from steel-pipe maker Welspun-Gujarat Stahl Rohren, tonnage handled at Little Rock’s river port through September is up by one-third over last year. Tonnage along the entire 445-mile McClellan-Kerr Navigation System is up more than 6 percent.
“We’re going and blowing,” said Paul Latture, executive director of the Little Rock Port Authority.
That wasn’t the case earlier this year. Heavy rains in May wound up pushing the river-current volume as much as 10 times higher than usual. Some stretches of it were impassable after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers shut ...
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Business, Pages 36 on 11/06/2009
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