My Voyage on a Great Lakes Freighter

By William A. Strauss
Senior Economist and Economic Advisor
Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

Come all you bold sailors that follow the Lakes
On an iron ore vessel your living to make.
I shipped in Chicago, bid adieu to the shore,
Bound away to Escanaba for red iron ore.

Lyrics from the song “Red Iron Ore”

In July I had a wonderful opportunity to learn about shipping commodities on the Great Lakes.  I was invited by the American Steamship Company to board one of the largest vessels that sails on the lakes: the M/V Burns Harbor.  She is one of 13 thousand- footers (as they are known based upon their overall length) that operate on the Great Lakes.  The operating season for these freighters, commonly referred to as lakers, is from the middle of March through late January.  In February and early March the vessels are docked and undergo extensive maintenance so that they do not experience any downtime during the season.

I boarded the vessel at Mittal Steel’s Burns Harbor facility in Burns Harbor, Indiana.  It was formerly a Bethlehem Steel plant and has stood on its site since 1964.  It remains one of the most efficient steel facilities in the country, and when Bethlehem built the M/V Burns Harbor in 1980, the corporation named her after its premier plant.  The M/V Burns Harbor sailed for the International Steel Group following its acquisition of Bethlehem Steel in the spring of 2003.  In the spring of 2005, International Steel Group was acquired by foreign-owned Mittal Steel. Shortly after, the M/V Burns Harbor became part of the American Steamship Company ’s fleet under the ownership of its parent company, GATX Corporation. 

Being a foreign-owned company, Mittal Steel was not allowed to own the M/V Burns Harbor and keep her as an American flagged vessel.  This is due to the Merchant Marine Act of 1920 —a statute sponsored by Senator Wesley L. Jones and often referred to as the Jones Act.  The cabotage provisions of the Jones Act restrict the carriage of goods or passengers between U.S. ports to U.S. built and flagged vessels.  Since the M/V Burns Harbor operates primarily between the iron facilities in Wisconsin and Minnesota to the steel mills in Indiana, she needed to remain an American flagged vessel, and hence was sold by Mittal to an American company.

The M/V Burns Harbor was built just prior to the computer revolution of the 1980s, and while her navigation equipment is state-of-the-art, the underlying machinery is not automated as a modern vessel is. The superstructure of the vessel is located near the stern; and while it creates a visual blind zone in front of the vessel, it saves millions of dollars in construction cost for the vessel, as all the engine and system control wiring to the pilothouse does not need to reach the nearly 1,000 feet to the bow of the vessel. The M/V Burns Harbor has four engines, each with 3,500 hp, delivering a total of 14,000 hp to her two propellers that operate at a full speed of 80 rotations per minute. The vessel carried a crew of 24 plus a female cadet from the Great Lakes Maritime Academy. The crew complement has been decreasing over time as technology has allowed the M/V Burns Harbor to be operated with fewer sailors.

Navigating Through Thick Fog

We left Burns Harbor, Indiana, on Tuesday at 9:00 p.m., traveling at 15 mph (they use statute miles rather than nautical miles for measurement on the Great Lakes), and arrived at Superior, Wisconsin, at 7:00 a.m. on Friday, 58 hours later having traveled more than 840 miles.  The trip upbound Lake Michigan was uneventful; however, when we entered Lake Huron, a thick fog enveloped the vessel to the point where we could not see the bow of the vessel from the pilothouse.  It was insight ful to see the decision- making taking place in the pilothouse on whether to traverse the very restrictive St. Marys River or drop the anchor and wait for the fog to lift.  After hearing from other vessels that the fog was dissipating further on up the river, we decided to proceed very slowly.  Traveling through the St. Marys River, which connects Lake Huron and Lake Superior, is the most difficult part of the voyage.  The river is not very wide and turns need to be made precisely.  The captain is required to be in the pilothouse overseeing the entire run through the St. Marys River, which takes around nine hours to accomplish.

On the river, close to Lake Superior are the Sault Ste. Marie Locks, also known as the Soo Locks.  These locks are among the busiest in the world with an average of 12,000 boats locking through each year.  The Soo Locks have been in operation for over 150 years ; of its four locks , the Poe Lock is the largest, and it is the only lock capable of handling the larger vessels that now make up nearly half of the 61- vessel Amercian fleet. These “Poe Class” vessels carry around 70 percent of the cargo capacity of the fleet.  The Poe Lock is 1,200 feet long and 110 feet wide, and the beam of the M/V Burns Harbor is 105 feet, leaving two and a half feet on both sides for this massive vessel to fit into the lock.  In fact, the M/V Burns Harbor has to drag her quarter against the dock to add resistance so that she is not pushed backward by all the water that is flowing out of the lock as she moves into the lock.  It is a sight to behold to see this massive vessel gracefully entering the lock.

Larger Lock Awaits Federal Funding

There is great concern about relying on Poe Lock as the sole link between the coal and iron ranges of Lake Superior and the rest of the Great Lakes.  If a failure occurs, it has the potential to cripple the Midwest economy.  For about 20 years, there have been discussions about the need for a second lock comparable to Poe .  The two smallest locks at the Soo were built nearly 90 years ago, and while 1,350 feet long, these two are too narrow, at only 80 feet wide, and too shallow to allow modern lakers to utilitze them. A new, larger lock has been designed that would replace these older locks, but lack of funding for this endeavor has hampered its progress.  However, federal funding does appear to be making its way through Congress.

The locking operation, which raises the water level by 21 feet for the upbound vessels into Lake Superior, takes just a few minutes.  During the locking operation a crewman from the laker runs to the retreive the mail from a Marine Post Office located at the lock.  With no guarantee of which port the laker will be traveling to throughout the season, the lock is the best bet to get items delivered.

Remembering the Edmund Fitzgerald

The trip on Lake Superior was pleasant , though this lake has a reputation for being quite dangerous.  Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area, and with an average depth of 483 feet, it contains enough water to cover the entire surface of both North and South America with a foot of water.  As we passed by Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, we came very close to the final resting spot of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the laker that sank on November 10, 1975, and was forever memorialized by the Gordon Lightfoot song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”   Built in 1958, the Edmund Fitzgerald was 729 feet long and 75 feet wide, and it carried 26,000 tons of cargo, significantly less than 80,000 tons the M/V Burns Harbor is capable of transporting.

Upon arriving at Superior, Wisconsin, what should have been an eight- hour stop in order to load the vessel, turned into a 37- hour stop because of a lack of taconite pellets at the dock.  We needed to wait for two trainloads of taconite pellets to be delivered in order to fill the holds of the vessel.  Up until the early part of last century the iron ore was of such high quality that taconite, which is an iron-bearing rock was considered a waste product.  However, shortly after World War II, most of the high- grade ore had been mined out, and so miners and shippers turned to taconite as a new source of iron. To process taconite, the ore is ground into a fine powder; the iron is separated from the waste rock by using strong magnets; and then the powdered iron concentrate is combined with clay and limestone as a flux, rolled into small pellets of about half an inch in diameter, and finally heated at very high temperatures to form the pellets.

Watching Rail Unloading Operations

The delay afforded me the opportunity to have a tour of the rail unloading operations.  A 150-car train is unloaded by one operator.  The train enters a building where a metal arm is lowered between the ore cars and then hydraulics advance the train three car lengths.  When in its proper position, three pistons extend out to begin rotating the cranks on the iron ore cars, which open the bay doors at the bottom of the cars, dumping the taconite pellets into waiting hoppers below the tracks.  The cranks are then reversed, closing the bay doors; the pistons are retracted; and the next three cars are then advanced.  Unloading three cars seemed to take just a minute or so. The hoppers feed a conveyor belt system that then transports the taconite three and a half miles to the dock.

The loading of the vessel— a very careful operation to make sure the load is properly distributed—took place on Saturday.   We were loaded with 62,000 tons of taconite pellets —an amount that is hard to fathom: the equivalent of 124 million pounds.  After loading, we broke lines and were underway by 8:00 p.m., with an estimated arrival time to Burns Harbor, Indiana, of 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday.  The downbound run was completed like clockwork; in fact, we made Burns Harbor, Indiana, at noon, just half an hour after our estimated time. N ot bad for a trip that took more than 60 hours.

Falling Water Level Poses Challenges

The greatest challenge on the downbound voyage was once more the St. Marys River, where the low water levels of the Great Lakes continue to challenge the industry both economically and navigationally .  Water levels throughout the Great Lakes have been falling for years.  For example, Lake Superior has seen a decline of a foot over the past year and is just three inches shy of its record low.  These low levels mean that as vessels approach ports and traverse rivers, they have less water below their keels.  This forces vessels to lighten themselves by carrying less cargo.  It is estimated that for each inch of lost draft costs the industry between 50 and 270 less tons shipped per trip.  It also slows the transit through the St. Marys River.  At certain points there was only two feet of water beneath the M/V Burns Harbor.  She was proceeding at just a few miles per hour, because if she went much faster, the higher turn rate for her propellors would create a suction, drawing the stern down into the bottom.

After arriving at Burns Harbor, Indiana, the self-unloading conveyor boom was extended from the vessel, and our cargo began to be unloaded into a hopper/conveyor system on shore.  At the bottom of each of the seven cargo holds there is a hatch known as a gate.  Beneath these gates, running the length of the vessel, is a conveyor belt system.  Gates are opened, and the taconite is conveyed toward the superstructure and then squeezed between two belts to elevate the material up to the deck level where it is then sent ashore along the conveyor boom.  It takes three people to unload the vessel without any assistance from ashore at an unloading rate that can reach 10,000 tons per hour.

I want to thank the crew of the M/V Burns Harbor.  Captain Lindmark and every member of the crew extended me a high degree of hospitality .  The crew of the M/V Burns Harbor also demonstrated a high degree of professionalism at every level.  This was a fantastic way for me to learn about the lake transport industry and the people directly involved in making the U.S. an extremely productive and competitive force in the world.