Aged Great Lakes lock could cripple US steel industry and hit manufacturing jobs

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/19/aged-great-lakes-lock-cripple-us-steel-industry-hit-manufacturing-jobs



Most of the iron ore used to feed America’s hunger for steel passes through the 50-year-old Soo Locks in Michigan. A failure could put millions of jobs at risk

Aged Great Lakes lock could cripple US steel industry and hit manufacturing jobs
Benjamin Preston
Saturday 19 March 2016 07.00 EDT

Between Lake Superior and the Great Lakes of North America lies a narrow canal, just 1.6 miles long. Each year some 10,000 ships pass through the Soo Locks of St Marys Fall canal, nearly all the iron ore used in the US passes through and millions of American jobs depend on them staying open. But age and neglect could soon put those jobs under threat.

Consider a day in the life of the average American. It’s an existence that rides upon a figurative highway of steel – steel appliances, steel cutlery and tools and, most important to the US economy, steel-bodied automobiles. That’s a lot of steel, and most of the ore it’s made of comes from mines in Minnesota and northern Michigan.

Now the transportation network that connects manufacturers with the raw materials they need may be hanging by a thread, suggests a Department of Homeland Security report unearthed by the Detroit Free Press. The report focuses on the economic impacts of a shutdown of the nearly 50-year-old Poe Lock – a vital waterway transportation link for huge cargo ships that carry raw materials and supplies back and forth across the Great Lakes – and says that a six-month closure of the lock could cost America 11 million jobs, crippling automakers and other manufacturers in the process.

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More than half of America’s locks are over 50 years old, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, which estimates some $3.6tn is needed to repair the US’s antiquated waterways.

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And we continue to build bigger and ever more more expensive weapons. Our national priorities are wrong.