Posted on June 30, 2016
Rushing water stretching hundreds of miles in length is one way you can explain the Ouachita River.
For Placid Refining Company they like to transports their oil by barge on this river rather than using trucks to transport by road.
“Very cheap, relatively easy, very low on solution, very efficient and reasonable priced way to get fuel to the market,” says Matt Pfister, Placid’s director of marketing and business development.
But funding on the river is in jeopardy because fewer barges are navigating through the area.
“This year for instance we got 1.2 million dollars dredge the river and it takes about three million to adequately dredge it so obviously that’s a problem. Lack of dredging causes problems for the shippers,” says John Stringer, vice president of Ouachita River Valley Association.
Dredging allows ships to go down the river without any problems, but with no money to continuously dredge the river business are choosing not to ship on the Ouachita.
If Placid or other oil companies were to pull out of using the river you could see an increase at the pumps.
“It would be not good for us cause we would lose the business but then it would raise the cost of fuel locally probably three to five cents a gallon is best I could guess,” says Pfister.
Stringer says without the Ouachita River at least 30,000 jobs would be lost along with several major corporations in our area.
“When you don’t have a reliable river system you can’t get businesses to come in and the businesses here are suffering so it’s just a bad situation and it looks like it’s going to get worse,” says Stringer.
The plan now for both groups is to go Washington to lobby congress for more money and to convince them how badly it’ll hurt the area without the river.
Source: KNOE
