The Mississippi River ranked first among the nation's waterways in attracting new construction and expansion of industrial production and service facilities in the fourth quarter of 1968, Braxton B. Carr, president of The American Waterways Operators, Inc., recently reported.
Data collected by the association, which represents the nation's barge and towing industry, indicate that 23 production industries selected sites on the Mississippi River for construction or expansion of plant facilities during the quarter. Most of these went to the lower Mississippi River area.
The AWO survey shows that production and service industries constructed or announced plans to construct or expand 109 plant facilities along the navigable waterways during the fourth quarter of 1968. This is the same number of such facilities built or announced in the third quarter of 1968.
Terminals, docks and wharves designed to handle the movement of freight to and from barges and for the exchange of freight by water carriers and other modes of transportation led the field in the fourth quarter of 1968 with 34 installations. This represents 31 percent of all new waterside plant facilities reported in the association's survey for the period.
Forty-seven of the 109 production and service industries constructed or expanded or for which plans were announced during the fourth quarter reported investment expenditures of more than $398,562,000.
The AWO president said that the fourth quarter figures indicated sustained interest on the part of management to take advantage of low-cost barge transportation (averaging three mills per ton mile) for handling bulk-loading commodities. He pointed out that while all of these industries may not use water transportation, the availability of commercial barge service and the effect this service has on the general freight rate structure is also a factor in plant locations along the nation's 25,380 miles of commercially navigable waterways. Additionally, he said, the availability of stable water supplies provided by navigation improvements attracts industrial plant locations.
Analysis of the 109 waterside sites that were developed in the fourth quarter of 1968 shows that in addition to the 34 terminals, docks and wharves, 24 were metal producing units, 22 were chemical facilities, 11 were paper production and processing facilities, 11 were general manufacturing units, three were grain installations, one was a powerplant, one was a fertilizer unit, one was a petroleum facility, one was a rubber installation, and one was a shipyard addition.
The waterways where the greatest activity took place in new plant starts and expansions in the fourth quarter, in addition to the Mississippi River with 23, were Arkansas-Verdigris River System with six, Gulf Intracoastal Waterway with six, Ohio River with six, Tennessee River with six, Illinois Waterway with five, Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway with four, Houston Ship Channel with four, Lake Michigan with four, Columbia River with three, Lake Erie with three, Missouri River with three, and Monongahela River with three.
The American Waterways Operators, Inc., first began keeping waterside plant site construction and expansion records in 1952. Since then, 7,112 such developments have been reported.