Detroit News: Peters: ‘If lock is shut down, economy shuts down’

Sault Ste. Marie – The 455-foot Zelada Desgagnes pauses while 22 million gallons of water are pumped into the Poe Lock, raising the hefty cargo ship 21 feet so it can continue on to Lake Superior to pick up iron ore, grain or other commodities.

It’s one of about 3,800 ships this year that will pass through the Poe, the largest of four locks at the Soo complex Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and the only one capable of handling ships wider than 76 feet.

“The raw materials that come through here on a massive basis – we can see it with this large ship here – would probably take three or four thousand trucks if these locks were broken and you couldn’t get these ships through,” U.S. Sen. Gary Peters, D-Bloomfield Township, said Friday.

“If this lock is shut down, the American economy shuts down. It is that significant.”

Peters joined U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, Gov. Rick Snyder, U.S. Rep. Fred Upton and other congressional members for a bipartisan tour of the Soo Locks, an engineering marvel that is showing significant signs of age.

They are urging the federal government to authorize as much as $1 billion to construct a new Poe-sized lock at the Soo complex, a critical conduit between Lake Superior and the lower Great Lakes for transporting goods and raw materials, including iron ore for steel production that is heavily relied on by automakers and other industries.

A mechanical or structural failure at the 49-year-old Poe Lock would be “catastrophic for the nation,” according to a late 2015 report by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which concluded a disruption could jeopardize 11 million U.S. jobs and plunge the economy into a severe recession.

“We’re on borrowed time, I think,” Stabenow, a Lansing Democrat, told The Detroit News. “We looked at a pump that was 100 years old. It’s unbelievable the engineering and that it’s still working.”

Stabenow and Republican U.S. Rep. Jack Bergman of Watersmeet on Thursday announced new federal legislation that would authorize spending on Soo Locks upgrades. They are hoping to jump start congressional action while they await the results of a study by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to determine if the benefits of the project would outweigh the cost.

A positive score could make the project a top priority for the Corps, Stabenow said.

The project, estimated to cost close to $1 billion over a 10-year construction period, would replace two smaller decommissioned locks built during World War I with a second Poe-sized lock capable of handling large “lakers” used to transport goods on the Great Lakes.

Lakers carrying iron ore use the Poe almost exclusively because they are too large for the smaller MacArthur Lock, built in 1943.

Michigan officials have long pushed for federal action on the Soo Locks modernization project, originally authorized in 1986 but never funded.

Their renewed efforts come as President Donald Trump pushes for increased infrastructure spending.