State overlooking waterway job possibilities

A recent front page article about gubernatorial candidate Sen. Vincent Sheheen quoted Sheheen as saying the three issues critically important to South Carolina are job creation, education, and health care in that order.

South Carolina is uniquely equipped to create thousands of jobs by making use of facilities put in place almost 70 years ago, designed for two purposes, and has been used almost exclusively for only one of the purposes for which it was created. The Santee Cooper Hydroelectric Power and Navigation System, as its name implies, was built to supply cheap electric power and cheap bulk transportation to the coastal and midlands sections of South Carolina. The recreational part: boating, swimming, fishing, hunting, which has been of tremendous value to the state, was not thought to be that significant. A few years back there was a proposal to begin barge traffic on this waterway but the proposal was quickly shot down. Why? Barge traffic would interfere with the recreation, so it was said.

My wife and I can testify that the two can thrive side by side. Each summer we trailer our small tug boat to a navigable river or waterway in this country or Canada. With the exception of the Erie Canal, which no longer has commercial traffic, all of the rivers/waterways on which we have traveled have had commercial traffic, that is, barges pushed by tow boats.

We completed a boat trip that started on Lake Michigan and ended on the Mississippi River at Port Charles Harbor, Mo. Most of our trip was on the Illinois Waterway. This waterway had by far more commercial traffic than we had ever experienced, except for New York Harbor. Nowhere on the Illinois Waterway was there a lack of pleasure boats or fishing, with the exception of fishing in the city of Chicago. The pleasure boat traffic was overwhelming on weekends and this includes the few miles we traveled on the Mississippi River as well as the Chicago vicinity. Hundreds of industries have been built on the banks of the Illinois waterway, most of which receive their raw materials by barge and some ship their finished products on the waterway. Chief among the industries are the large grain complexes: ADM, Cargill, and Continental. They would fit well in the farm state of South Carolina.

Recently opposition has risen to enlarging the size of the Port of Charleston because of the increase in truck traffic to and from the port that would come with an increase in shipping. Put this fact in the hopper: One barge will take 58 trucks off the highway. We have many times seen one towboat pushing as many as 15 barges. That's 870 trucks off the highway. The Santee Cooper Waterway was not constructed for fifteen-barge traffic but could easily handle four barge towboats or 232 truck loads. The state of South Carolina has the infrastructure in place to attract multiple industries, which of course creates jobs. Are we going to let this waterway just sit there and not make full use of its potential?

ROBERT J. TILLER

Mayesville