Seaway To Nowhere

THE ST. LAWRENCE SEAWAY WAS an important part of my life for at least forty years, from the early 1930s to 1975. As a native and long-time resident of Ogdensburg, New York—Seaway country—I watched it develop from a hotly disputed geopolitical concept to a massive construction enterprise to a vital international trade route. And then I watched it decline from a world-renowned engineering masterpiece to a half-forgotten artifact of the 1950s, a victim of global economic and logistics changes and its own design shortcomings.

Though I scarcely realized it at the time, I was a witness to what is still one of the most complicated public works projects ever brought off, and the largest construction undertaking of its kind ever done in a populated area. Yet, alone among world-class civil engineering wonders, the Seaway holds the dubious distinction of being less famous now than before it was built.

Today, if the Seaway is mentioned at all in the press, it’s probably because of the notorious zebra mussel, an alien form of marine life introduced to the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes from the Caspian Sea about ten years ago. But the zebra mussel plague would have happened anyway, Seaway or not. Years before the Seaway was built, the Atlantic sea lamprey and the herring-like alewife did the same thing, migrating up the river to invade the lakes.

The lamprey and alewife invasions demonstrate, albeit in a negative way, why the St. Lawrence has always been so important: In the course of its roughly 760 miles from Lake Ontario to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, it provides a ready-made connection between the interior of the continent and the Atlantic Ocean. Unfortunately, a journey that’s possible for sea creatures has not always been so easy for people in boats. Ever since Europeans started settling in North America, they’ve been searching for a way to overcome the numerous falls, rapids, shallows, and bends between the lakes and the sea. Yet when the entire route was finally made navigable for seagoing vessels in the late 1950s, it was already well along the path to obsolescence.

“The Seaway” is a general term for all the navigation and hydroelectric development along the St. Lawrence River. After many piecemeal improvements through the years, it was completed in one great burst of energy between 1954 and 1959, when the last section of troublesome rapids—the 112-mile stretch between Ogdensburg and Montreal—was finally tamed with a series of seven locks, built to accommodate vessels up to 730 feet long with a maximum width of 76 feet and draft of 26 feet. It was an international joint venture like no other of its time, with the United States and Canada sharing the planning and the cost, which turned out to be just over a billion dollars for navigation improvements and power generation. Forty-five years earlier the Panama Canal had cost $400 million. The Suez Canal, completed in 1869, was an $84million project.

The magnitude of the work was staggering: 210 million cubic yards of excavation (enough to create a mountain 63 miles high over a hockey rink), 6.1 million cubic yards of concrete (the equivalent of a four-lane highway from London to Rome), 45 miles of dikes, 69 miles of channels. Building the St. Lawrence project required relocating some 9,000 people (and 6,000 gravestones), mostly on the Canadian side, and rerouting 47 miles of highway and 40 miles of double-track railroad. As part of the hydroelectric project, a 20mile-long pool was created between Waddington and Massena, New York. At the height of construction 22,000 workers were employed on both sides of the river.

IN THE EARLY 1930S, AS A YOUNG ster growing up in Ogdensburg, I learned to read the local newspapers by following the endless political skirmishes over the St. Lawrence navigation and power project, which would finally start to be built twenty years later. In the late 1940s and early 1950s I made more trips than I want to remember to hearings in Albany, Washington, New York City, and Ottawa as a gung-ho member of various boost-the-Seaway delegations.

The promise of the Seaway was to create a fourth U.S. seacoast, a shorter, faster trade route between mid-America and Europe than the combination of railroads, inland waterways, and seagoing ships then in use. With a properly improved seaway, ore from Duluth, lumber from Green Bay, steel from Cleveland, and automobiles from Detroit could be loaded onto freighters and shipped all the way to Liverpool, Rome, or Marseilles with no further need to break bulk.

While I was growing up, it was an article of faith that the Seaway would turn Ogdensburg, with its population of 17,000, into another Pittsburgh. Just how such a transformation could take place in our bucolic area, with no raw materials to speak of, a small skilled labor force, and one of the country’s longest and most severe winter climates, was never explained. But the Depression was on, and people everywhere were more inclined toward hope than reality.

The Pittsburgh analogy was invoked by Bishop Joseph H. Conroy of Ogdensburg in a 1934 message to President Roosevelt. To us the bishop’s advocacy seemed natural enough. After all, the vision of the Seaway originated with another Catholic priest in Ogdensburg in 1749, when it was Fort La Présentation, part of New France. Père François Picquet, the Sulpician missionary who established the fort and turned it into a trading post, forwarded to France a plan to make the St. Lawrence navigable for seagoing ships. It was rejected by the government of Louis XV, which was having a domestic budget crunch at the time.

In fact, thoughts of using the St. Lawrence for international trade go back two centuries earlier. When Jacques Cartier became the first European ever to behold the river in 1535, he thought he had discovered the longsought Northwest Passage to Cathay and India. He was stopped by a threemile stretch of white-water rapids near what is now Montreal. Folklore has it that Cartier named the rapids La Chine in the belief that China lay not far beyond. Though they never found China, French adventurers did follow the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes as far as they could. A spot as remote as Duluth, a thousand miles from the ocean, had a trading post as early as 1679.

The river that Cartier discovered (which for many years was the only one to be found on maps of North America) drains 95,000 square miles of the five Great Lakes—the largest body of fresh water in the world—as well as a broad swath of the Canadian littoral and at least half of New York’s Adirondack mountain range, which account for another 300,000 square miles. A glacial quirk shaped the international section of the river (that is, the part that divides the United States from Canada). From its start at Cape Vincent, New York, east to Ogdensburg, a distance of about 60 miles, the river’s water level drops only about 10 inches. But from Ogdensburg to Cornwall, Ontario, another 44 miles downstream, the drop is 86 feet. Multiply that by a steady flow of 260,000 cubic feet per second, and you have an impassable navigation channel—and the makings of a worldclass hydropower complex. (The river falls another 130 feet or so on its way from Cornwall to the sea; Canada took advantage of this drop with a hydroelectric plant near Montreal in the early 1930s.)

THE FIRST ST. LAWRENCE CANAL project dates back to 1700, before anyone dreamed of hydroelectric power. It was a contract awarded by another indomitable soldier-priest, Dollier de Casson, head of the Sulpicians in New France, to bypass the Lachine Rapids with a mile-long canal 12 feet wide and a minimum 18 inches deep. (De Casson had suggested such a canal as early as 1680.) The contractor went bankrupt with the job only half done, a fate that would befall more than one construction firm on the U.S. side of the canal some 250 years later.

For a long time following the Revolutionary War (which began only a dozen years after France ceded Quebec to the British), neither nation trusted the other on the lakes or the St. Lawrence. In 1813 Oliver Hazard Perry’s U.S. flotilla blew the British fleet out of Lake Erie. Even as late as the Civil War, when Britain was flirting with the Confederacy, it was argued in Congress that “in one short month a British fleet of light-draught, heavily armed iron-clad gunboats could pass up the St. Lawrence into the Lakes and shell every city and village from Ogdensburgh to Chicago.”

Both nations considered alternative routes from the Great Lakes to the Eastern seaboard; these ranged from inadequate to ludicrous. The Erie Canal, completed in 1825, was one early attempt. It ran for 363 miles between Buffalo and Albany, across the hilly terrain of New York State. The canal took eight years and $7 million to build and was the technological wonder of its age, spawning a whole generation of civil engineers. Yet by the 185Os it was losing much of its traffic to the railroads. The reason: Even after several expansions, in 1862 it was only 70 feet wide and 7 feet deep—reasonable dimensions for flat-bottomed horse-drawn boats, but much too slow and puny for large-scale movement of goods.

Canada has always felt the need for an east-west marine passageway to solidify its unity as a nation, a proposition that remains shaky to this day. By bringing Western raw materials to Eastern cities (where they could be used in manufacturing or transferred to seagoing ships), such a system, while short of a full-scale seaway, would benefit both sections and thus bind the country closer together. This nationwide consensus was possible because the great bulk of Canada’s trade has always had to pass through the St. Lawrence; its maritime ports are too small and remote to provide much competition. In the United States, by contrast, there was never any sort of unanimity about improvements on the St. Lawrence. From the beginning all such efforts were opposed tooth and nail by U.S. ports on the Eastern seaboard, which feared losing business to their northern rival. And when it came to the actual Seaway project, even Buffalo and Montreal were ambivalent, the former wary of losing its thriving grain trade and the latter its transshipment business—fears that indeed were realized once the Seaway was opened.

Canada built (and constantly upgraded) canals along the river and between the lakes from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. By 1907 the St. Lawrence had been dredged to a minimum depth of about 30 feet from Montreal to the sea. At the other end, between the head of the lakes and Ogdensburg, the system could accommodate boats of 25-foot draft, thanks to the improved Weiland Canal at Niagara Falls (started in 1914 and opened in 1931) and the various canals at Sault Sainte Marie (deepened in the 1890s and further improved since).

IN BETWEEN, THOUGH, THERE RE mained the same old bottleneck from Ogdensburg to Montreal. By early in the century the industrious Canadians had built a system of locks and canals to accommodate boats up to 250 feet long and 43 feet wide, drawing no more than 14 feet, but that was all. The restrictions limited vessels on this stretch of the river to a maximum weight of about 3,000 tons—very small potatoes by world shipping standards.

World War I forced both the United States and Canada into a different way of thinking about the St. Lawrence. It quickly became clear that neither country’s railroads could handle the upsurge in freight. In addition, an acute shortage of electrical power occurred after the United States entered the war in 1917 (Canada had been in from the start), causing officials on both sides of the border to think about the rush of potential St. Lawrence power that was going to waste.

In 1919 the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Tidewater Association set up shop in Washington; over the next sixteen years it raised more than half a million dollars—a huge sum in the pre-PAC era—to lobby a Seaway project through Congress. Thus began thirty-five years of debates, hearings, position papers, and every other tool of persuasion imaginable on both sides of the border and all sides of the issues involved. According to one historian, the “engineering of consent” of the multifarious state, provincial, and national governments to advance the Seaway to treaty stage was more difficult than engineering and building the thing itself.

It certainly took a lot longer. Canadian ports in Quebec and the maritime provinces, and American ports on the East and Gulf coasts, mobilized to beat down any Seaway proposal. Anti-Seaway sentiment was also strong—on both sides of the border—in the railroad, inland shipping, and coal-mining industries and among private electrical utilities. Of course, the project didn’t die. Like any idea whose time has come, development of the river simply began gathering momentum.

The inescapable link between marine navigation and hydroelectric generation was brought out in a 1920s joint-venture proposal floated by Alcoa, Du Pont, and General Electric: They offered to construct a 25-footdeep shipping channel between Ogdensburg and Montreal in exchange for the rights to develop St. Lawrence power. Privately owned Canadian utility companies opposed the plan, knowing that Canada’s share of the power would go to the government-owned Ontario Hydro, decreasing demand for their own kilowatts.

BETWEEN THE WARS CANADIAN suspicion over U.S. involvement lingered. Earlier anxiety over military invasion had been replaced by fears of commercial conquest. A Canadian senator charged that the proposed joint development was a “Trojan Horse” that would plant “the Stars and Stripes on the banks of the St. Lawrence.” Such rhetoric may sound overwrought, but America the Conqueror played well in Canada then, as it still does. It’s important to remember that the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes are mostly Canadian waters. Of the river’s approximately 760 miles, only 112 are international. Of the five Great Lakes, only Lake Michigan lies wholly within the United States.

Through the 1930s and 1940s efforts toward a deal between the two nations got nowhere. A 1932 treaty was rejected by the U.S. Senate in 1934, and a similar 1941 agreement was abandoned after Pearl Harbor. The Seaway might never have been built at all if not for the stepped-up development of rich iron ore deposits in northern Quebec and Labrador.

After World War II George M. Humphrey—president of M. A. Hanna Company, the big Cleveland coal and steel producer—began advocating construction of the Seaway as a means to move Canadian ore to Midwestern steel mills. Time and again, to anyone who would listen, including Congress, he warned that the Lake Superior ore ranges, by far the biggest source for the U.S. steel industry, were fast running out. He also stepped up fund-raising for pro-Seaway lobbying groups. Canada put additional pressure on the United States by authorizing an all-Canadian seaway in 1951; the United States faced the prospect of a seaway being built with or without its cooperation. In 1953, when George Humphrey became Secretary of the Treasury under Eisenhower, he rallied White House support for the project. Suddenly opposition to the Seaway, once so powerful and well organized, seemed to melt away.

A decisive break with the past came in January 1954, when John F. Kennedy, then a freshman senator from Massachusetts, declared for the Seaway in a fifteen-minute speech on the Senate floor. No senator or representative from Massachusetts had supported the Seaway for the past twenty years; in fact, Kennedy himself had opposed it during his 1952 campaign. Yet barely a year later he was saying of New England’s opposition to the project, “We cannot continue so narrow and destructive a position.” The young senator already had presidential ambitions, and he probably realized that a Seaway project was inevitable in the long run. Thus he decided to get ahead of the issue instead of alienating the rest of the country in a losing cause.

Kennedy’s declaration of support was the turning point. Within days the two New Jersey senators dropped their opposition, as did Sen. Everett M. Dirksen of Illinois. On January 20 the Senate passed the Seaway measure by a margin of 51 to 33. The House voted its approval on May 6. A week later President Eisenhower signed the bill. The Seaway idea was finally going to become a reality.

ABRUPTLY AND UNEXPECTED ly, the great controversy had come to a close—and we in Ogdensburg were the winners. What had seemed impossible only a few months before was now going to happen. Word was out that some construction would be under way before the end of the summer. Not without some skepticism, I began gearing up for whatever business it might bring. And as it turned out, I didn’t have long to wait.

In early August the McConville company was handed a no-bid, hurry-up contract by New York State to ready a cow pasture overlooking the Long Sault Rapids near Massena for the official groundbreaking of the power-generating part of the project. In a matter of days we relocated the cattle, mowed away what grass the Holsteins had left behind, rough-graded a parking lot, installed portable toilets, scrounged some bleachers, and set up a speaker’s platform.

THE CEREMONY TOOK place on August 10, 1954, the 419th anniversary of Cartier’s naming of the St. Lawrence. I watched Robert Moses, chairman of New York State’s Power Authority and the century’s most prolific builder of public works (some would add crusty, bellicose, ruthless, and outrageous), preside over the ceremonies as Gov. Thomas E. Dewey set off a ceremonial dynamite charge to launch construction of the $600million, 1.6-million-kilowatt hydroelectric complex at the eastern end of the Seaway. Louis St. Laurent (Canada’s fittingly named prime minister) and Ontario’s Premier Leslie M. Frost looked on. With much less hoopla the St. Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation began work on the navigation phase of the project in April 1955.

The Seaway’s glory days—its five-year construction and first eighteen years of operation—were great while they lasted. The project brought a spirit and sense of enterprise to the valley that I’d never felt before. No longer were we a passed-over community, listening to the oldsters’ tired recollections of when Ogdensburg was a bustling port, big in the lumber trade until World War I, when the nearby Adirondack forests played out.

People started pouring in, construction workers mostly, but others as well, to set up support businesses for the Seaway construction firms. Most of the newcomers were from the West—wide-open, vibrant, go-ahead people unfettered with memories of smalltown decline. Thousands of construetion jobs were created, some with weekly paychecks of three hundred dollars and up. That was big money in the 1950s, especially in an area where fifty to seventy-five dollars a week was the norm.

Unfortunately, the renaissance was not to last. Shortly after the construction phase was over, the St. Lawrence Valley shrank back to its pre-Seaway size or less. Today most of the river shipping steams right on by, and much of the St. Lawrence hydropower is exported from the area. Manufacturing jobs are actually fewer than in 1954, the year construction began. That’s not how things were supposed to turn out. Over those five years, though, I was constantly on the job as a contractor in the muck and mire of Seaway construction. And for fifteen years after the opening, the family-owned company that I managed was seldom without some kind of Seaway-connected work. Don’t get the idea that McConville Inc. was a major contractor on the Seaway; it wasn’t. We were just one of many companies, large and small, involved in what was then the world’s largest ongoing construction project.

The bulk of the Seaway and power contracts were carried out by titans of the industry, firms with names like Morrison-Knudsen, Perini, and Kiewit. While the McConville firm subcontracted from them and others, we also won our share of smaller prime contracts. The work was diverse, from dike construction to positioning ice-control booms, working on navigation aids, heavy hauling contracts, and paving. One of our last Seaway assignments was building and operating a government-owned duty-free retail outlet at the International Bridge east of Massena.

At first every contractor involved in Seaway construction found the work nasty, brutish, and unprofitable. New York’s St. Lawrence Valley, with its soggy, early autumns, long, frigid winters, and even soggier springtimes that often last through mid-May, is far from hospitable to contractors. “Worse than Alaska,” a construction manager familiar with both places told me recently. The first construction job, which began just north of Massena in September 1954, didn’t bankrupt the contractor, for the Dravo Corporation had deep pockets. But it humbled the Pittsburgh firm, a successful lock and dam builder with long experience on the inland waterways.

Dravo shipped into the St. Lawrence Valley believing the river was not all that different from the Mississippi or Ohio and tried to tackle the job with the same kinds of machines used on highway construction. It was a costly miscalculation, for digging the Seaway required equipment on a different scale—outsized excavators and haulers used for mining, not road-building gear.

The scope of Dravo’s $3 million-plus contract was to divert the white-water flow of the St. Lawrence’s south channel to allow construction of Long Sault Dam about four miles downstream. Shifting the channel meant cutting a diversion channel through Long Sault Island, just opposite the U.S. mainland; damming off the south channel with circular cells of interlocking sheet steel piling filled with gravel; and then pumping the water out of the impoundment to provide a place to work “in the dry.”

The pile driving, with air hammers, moved along fairly well once the Dravo people got used to the idea that it’s no small task to raise and maintain a head of steam in sub-zero temperatures. In fact, all the purely mechanical processes on the Seaway, from the early pile driving to installation of the lock and powerhouse machinery toward the end of the work, went along just fine. But horrendous soil conditions turned the Seaway into an excavators’ Waterloo.

BEFORE WINTER WAS OVER, THE Dravo project was hampered by overnight temperatures close to minus forty degrees Fahrenheit. That kind of cold changes all the rules of equipment operation: Engines must be left running for days and nights on end, whether working or not. Dravo learned quickly that restarting every piece of equipment on a sub-freezing Monday morning could use up most of a ten-hour shift.

As temperatures plummeted, equipment repair costs zoomed upward. The crawler pads of shovels and bulldozers and other parts subject to stress cracked and crumbled. Drive chains flew apart, cables snapped, and fuel lines iced up. Material excavated from below the frost quickly froze in the trucks’ dump bodies and could not be ejected. And anything made of metal, especially cast metal, was liable to crystallize and break into pieces.

UNTIL THE SEAWAY, NORTH ern New Yorkers knew little about glacial till and marine clay. The construction work we were used to never involved mass excavation so far below grade. Even today John B. Adams, who was a fledgling project engineer for the Corps of Engineers during construction, shudders at the mention of glacial till. “Good concrete runs 150 pounds per cubic foot, but the glacial till along the Seaway was even more dense, at about 165 pounds, and cemented with calcium carbonates,” says Adams, recently retired as senior engineer for the Seaway Corporation at Massena.

The abrasiveness of the hard-packed till was unbelievable. In the excavation we’d been doing before the Seaway, a set of removable teeth on a shovel dipper would last six months or more. Working in glacial till, we found we had to install a new set every shift. The friction of the glaciated material made dipper teeth and scrapers’ cutting edges hot enough to burn a bare hand. The pre-Seaway 5,000-hour life of a set of tractor crawlers was reduced by two-thirds.

It wasn’t long before contractors began bringing in their heavy artillery. The Gentleman appeared on the Seaway late in the spring of 1955. That was the name Roger and Brown Badgett gave to their 650-ton Bucyrus-Erie “walking” dragline (it moved on pontoon-like outriggers rather than crawlers), which carried a 15-cubicyard bucket on a 165-foot boom. The Gentleman had been built for the Midwest coalfields, where it worked for most of its first sixteen years. Then the Badgetts signed up to move 3.8 million cubic yards of till—a 7,600foot upstream section of the Long Sault canal—for $1.3 million. That came to about 34 cents a cubic yard, a low price even then. But the ability to perform big-volume excavation with only a few pieces of equipment and little labor made possible rock-bottom prices even with the Seaway’s harsh geology.

THE NATIONAL PRESS FELL IN love with The Gentleman right from the start. The Seaway was big news in its early stages, and the Badgett brothers, good ol’ boys and veteran earthmovers out of Madisonville, Kentucky, knew how to milk a good story. The big rig, a smaller dragline, and the rest of the Badgett equipment had been moved intact to the St. Lawrence from the Kentucky coalfields by barge through inland waterways. Both draglines “walked” overland eighteen miles to the Pond River, then were barged through the Green, Ohio, Mississippi, Illinois, and Des Plaines rivers, the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, the Chicago River, and four of the Great Lakes to the St. Lawrence—a circuitous route of almost 2,000 miles.

Capt. William Golden, now a retired river pilot in Ogdensburg, remembers taking a tug lashed to a barge with The Gentleman aboard through the white-water rapids between Ogdensburg and Long Sault on the way to the work site: “The barge was far too big to go through those old canals that bypassed the rapids, so we lashed our tug alongside, shut down the power, and went with the flow.”

Just as the tug and barge cleared the rapids and entered the swift waters of the main channel, an upbound canaler appeared from around a bend. “There was no way to control the tow,” Golden says. “We were on a collision course, and I was deciding to jump overboard when Roger Badgett, who was with me aboard the tug, grabbed a bullhorn and calmly called up to Don Utley, at the controls of The Gentleman , ‘See if you can drop your bucket and grab a piece of real estate with that rig.’ Utley let the bucket go into the water. Just in time he snagged the river bottom, and there we were, firmly anchored, as the canaler glided past tlose enough for me to shake hands with the captain.”

A few miles downstream, as the barge and tug veered again out of the channel toward Long Sault Island, “the barge got wedged between two little islands. Badgett got on the horn to Utley again. ‘Better dig us out, Don,’ he said. It took him only a few minutes to boom up and bite off enough of the edge of the island to get us through.”

The prospect of tough excavation didn’t faze another pair of brothers, Jack and Jim Maser. They emerged from the Pennsylvania coalfields to take on the glacial till at Robinson Bay, site of the Elsenhower Lock, with a fleet of rubber-tired scrapers. By October 1955, having moved close to a million cubic yards of the stuff (half the amount called for in their contract), the Masers gave up and went home. “They couldn’t make enough to pay for their cutting edges,” said one of the project engineers, referring to the replaceable hardened steel blades attached to the leading edges of the scraper bowls.

There was a place for scrapers on the Seaway, but their role was minor. The bulk of the heavy excavation was done with big draglines and power shovels. In fact, it was the last hurrah of the power shovel, though king-size models are still used for mining (their first hurrah had come on the Panama Canal half a century earlier). Big hydraulic front-end loaders, which supplanted the cable excavators, came out in force right after the Seaway construction.

Even with such hefty equipment, drilling and blasting were often required to loosen the till and make excavation possible. Making matters worse were other “unanticipated site conditions,” an engineers’ euphemism for potential disasters. The till was often laced with fine material that turned to slime at the first exposure to moisture, making it next to impossible to manipulate. John Adams remembers that greenish blue marine clay well: “There was nothing else like it on the whole project. It had the consistency of toothpaste.”

By the beginning of 1956 the world’s largest concentration of heavy-duty construction equipment was deployed on either side of the St. Lawrence Valley. Working the forty-four miles between Ogdensburg and the site of the power dam at Cornwall were at least 20 walking draglines, 130 power shovels and crawler-mounted draglines, at least 300 off-highway haulers (some the largest in existence at the time), 100 or more scrapers, big and small, and more than 300 bulldozers and other crawler tractors. So commonplace were big excavators by then that it barely made the papers when Kiewit barged in a huge dragline, a clone of the Badgetts’ Gentleman , all the way from Louisiana to a job site near Massena, an inland waterway voyage of well over 2,000 miles that took five weeks. By the time of the Seaway’s ceremonial opening, on June 26, 1959, with Queen Elizabeth and President Eisenhower in attendance, the Seaway had been visited in one way or another by most of the world’s major contractors.

THE CAN-DO ETHIC OF THE Eisenhower era has left behind two major civil engineering monuments: the interstate highway system and the St. Lawrence Seaway. The interstate system works; in fact, it has exceeded its original scope and mission by revolutionizing the nation’s logistics, changing the way we travel, and knitting the country’s regions closer together. (See “The Rise of the Interstates,” Invention & Technology , Fall 1991.) Thanks to constant redesign and reconstruction, the interstate remains a vital part of the U.S. economy.

The Seaway is a different, less happy story. It was obsolescent even while it was under construction, and today its seven locks are inadequate in every dimension: too shallow, too narrow, and too short for most of the world’s merchant shipping fleet. The Panama Canal, opened in 1914, was far more efficiently designed and has been constantly upgraded ever since; its locks are 1,000 feet long and 110 feet wide and can handle vessels of 40-foot draft. The lockless, water-level Suez Canal can handle virtually any vessel, since it is nowhere less than 179 feet wide, with a minimum channel depth of 40 feet. But the Seaway is so inherently flawed that it is beyond improvement. When it opened, its proprietors boasted that it was passable by three-quarters of the world’s merchant fleet. Unfortunately, it was taken unawares by containerization, the revolutionary concept introduced in 1956 that changed the nature of international shipping and condemned the St. Lawrence to a bulk-cargo future.

Container carriers did give the Seaway a try at first. In 1978 some 271,000 tons of containerized shipments moved through the system. By 1993, though, that figure was down to 29,000 tons, and in 1994 it slipped even further, to 16,000 tons. The cold, hard reality is that most of the world’s container fleet today is too large for the Seaway locks. And it takes about twenty hours to make a one-way passage through the Seaway, a turnaround cycle far too leisurely for schedule-driven container carriers.

That doesn’t make the Seaway all bad. As an engineered system it remains a marvel and continues to work like a charm when called upon. And, of course, the hydro plants keep pumping out inexpensive power. But for navigation, the Seaway’s basic problem of underdesign seems beyond remedy. The billions of dollars that would be required to bring the locks and canals up to standard are far more than Canada and the United States would be willing or able to spend —and probably not cost-effective either. No longer considered the natural corridor for bulk cargoes, and bypassed for other types of goods by the container revolution, the St. Lawrence Seaway was written off by most major ocean shippers and carriers years ago. Even in its halcyon days, the Seaway never reached its design capacity of 60 million tons of cargo a year; volume peaked at 57 million tons in 1977. By 1994 tonnage had dropped to 38 million.

An even greater obstacle to modernizing the Seaway is the heightened present-day concern with the environment, a consideration that barely existed when the project was dreamed up. Even as the Seaway was being designed and built, a marine biologist named Rachel Carson published The Sea Around Us (1951) and The Edge of the Sea (1956), two landmark books that launched the U.S. ecological movement and rendered grandiose projects like the St. Lawrence Seaway—or any expansion of it—virtually unthinkable.

That the Seaway is an anachronism, frozen in time and likely to remain so, became plain a few years ago, when ecological activities hooted down proposals to experiment with advanced ice-control technology that could make it almost a year-round operation. With most of the river and Great Lakes ice-bound between December and April, the Seaway currently operates about 275 days a year.

WITH THE ENORMOUS IN vestment of time, effort, and money, why was the Seaway such a commercial debacle? Some blame the Eisenhower administration, which promised a world-class waterway but delivered only a cheapjack passage for Labrador iron ore to the Midwest. When that traffic faded during the Rust Belt era, so did the Seaway as a vital economic force. Cowed by Canada’s threat to go it alone, Congress appropriated a meager $134 million to build its share of the navigation project, less than half of what was needed to do a proper job. Canada’s share came to $335 million (the American and Canadian dollars were nearly equal at the time).

Other critics point to the more aggressive and politically attuned marketing of the toll-free, allAmerican waterways that feed into the Mississippi. For example, when relief grain exports were soaking up U.S. farm surpluses, Mississippi Valley legislators leaned heavily on the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other agencies to route traffic through the inland waterway system. By comparison, the Seaway has always fallen short on selling itself. From the beginning, the U.S. and Canadian operating companies have tended to be bland, caretaker-type federal bureaucracies—”lock tenders and canal maintainers, not hard-charging marketers,” as a Seaway official in Washington puts it.

One knowledgeable Canadian official blames the traffic shortfall on the United States: “The American corporation in charge of the Seaway only goes after bulk cargo traffic. They’ve given up on containers. But containers are moved by barge on every major river in Europe—the Rhine, the Rh’f4ne, the Danube. There is no reason why containers couldn’t be picked up at Great Lakes ports and moved to Quebec City for transshipment on container ships that are too large for the Seaway.”

What is so important about container traffic? It’s where the money is. Ask a Seaway competitor, Kevin P. Reilly, Louisiana’s secretary of economic development, who wishes more containers were moving through New Orleans and other Louisiana ports. “Containers generate lots more manufacturing and transportation than bulk cargo. That’s one of our prime missions: to get more container traffic.”

But even in bulk movement the Seaway often gets short shrift. Seaway officials admit that the Mississippi is the river of choice for most U.S. bulk shippers. “Shippers’ habits are hard to change,” concedes one U.S. Seaway official in frustration. The Seaway’s winter shutdown is part of the problem.

To make matters worse, the world is running out of oceangoing bulk-handling ships small enough to fit the Seaway locks. While boats that ply only the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence can have useful lives of as long as fifty years, the average life cycle of saltwater ships runs from ten to fifteen years, and few saltwater shipowners are replacing their Seaway-size tonnage.

To solve that problem, the U.S. and Canadian Seaway agencies are considering a subsidy program to encourage shipping companies to build Seawaysize tonnage to replace the present fleet. The problem has been slightly eased by a 1994 ruling from Ottawa and Washington permitting 78-foot-wide ships to pass through the 80-foot-wide locks. Before that ruling, 76 feet was the maximum width. There may be as many as two dozen additional ships worldwide that can use the Seaway under the wider allowance.

DESPITE CONSIDERABLE AC counting sophistry, the Seaway, which was sold on the premise that it would be a profit-generating project, has shown only losses through its thirty-six years of existence. The United States now considers the Seaway a pro bono enterprise, like the interstate highway system. The American Seaway agency discloses no operating figures and survives on annual stipends from Congress. Canada managed to show a profit in 1994—the first in many years—of $10 million, up from a loss of $6 million in 1993. However, Canada’s Seaway figures are bolstered by toll collections from Weiland Canal revenues.

Of course, the hydroelectric function of the Seaway has always been profitable; it’s cheap to convert waterpower to kilowatts.

By any measure the St. Lawrence Seaway is a shared U.S.-Canadian treasure and a reminder of what was possible in an age before today’s stringent environmental constraints. But it is also an example of how misguided politics and the shortsightedness of nations can play havoc with a 460-year-old international trade concept.