Tug Boats, Part 2: The Economics of Tugs

American tugs and towboats move a huge amount of freight every day, both on the inland and coastal waterways, and to Alaska and Hawaii.

Rivers are a major highway for transporting goods. The American Waterways Operators estimates that the nearly 4,000 tug and towboats on the inland waterways transports 20-percent of the nation's coal and 60-percent of its grain each year in the more than 28,000 barges in active service. New England gets most of its heating oil, and the inland Pacific Northwest most of its diesel fuel by barge. The AWO says all this traffic contributes $5 billion a year to the US economy.

Virtually all goods not flown into southeast Alaska come by barge, and a large percentage of goods bound for south central Alaska (the Anchorage area) and the Aleutians go the same way (just try finding some of your favorite items in the grocery store in Juneau if the barge is running a day or two late). Hawaii and many smaller Pacific islands rely on tugs and barges dispatched from the the US mainland.

Tug and barge operators compete directly with trucking companies and railroads. A typical barge can carry 3500 tons of cargo, or about one million gallons of fuel. The same amount of cargo requires 35 rail cars or 120 semitrailers. In other words, a towboat and four barges transports enough goods to replace semis stretched over 20 miles of highway. Tidewater Barge Lines says they can move one ton of cargo 514 miles on one gallon of fuel, compared to 202 miles for a rail car or 59 miles for a semi truck. They claim the reduced fuel usage results in lower greenhouse gas emissions as well when compared to other modes of transport.

See the American Waterways Operators site for more on the economic impact of the tug and towboat industry.

For more comparing barge transport versus other modes, see the National Waterways Foundation study here.

In The News: Northwest Passage Transit

Crew Arrives In Seattle After Journey Through Northwest Passage. This story from the Three Sheets Northwest blog, as it appears in the Seattle PostGlobe.

Tug Boats, Part 1: Types of Tugs

Some of the hardest-working boats in the world are tugboats and towboats (I'll call them "tugs" here for convenience sake, with apologies to the many towboat crew who hate to be lumped in this category). A tug is any vessel that assists another in maneuvering. The other vessel may be unable to maneuver at all, like a barge or a vessel with mechanical problems, or just need assistance in a narrow channel or alongside a berth, like a large container ship coming into port. There are several different types of tugs:

Commercial assistance towboats. These tend to be small craft designed to help out other small craft with mechanical problems or that have just run out of fuel. They are the sea-going equivalent of Triple A. Although they may be available on a call-out basis in some harbors, many also offer a membership, again like Triple A. The Sea Tow franchise is the most visible and well known of these outfits.

Harbor tugs. Any vessel who's job it is to help a large ship get into out of an anchorage or berth in a harbor. This is the kind of vessel most people think of when they think, "tug boat." These tugs are very powerful for their size to, in effect, provide an additional engine for the large ship they are assisting. Harbor tugs tend to have lots of cushioning, especially on the bow, so thy can get right up against other vessels. They pull by attaching themselves to the vessel using wire cable or strong fiber line. Pictured above on the left is the just-launched Seaspan Resolution, which serves the harbor in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Seagoing tugs. These tugs meant for ocean service may be seen hauling a barge of supplies to Alaska or islands in the Pacific, or towing a large ship from one port to another. The picture in the center above is a seagoing tug towing a ship through the Panama Canal.

ITBs or "integrated tug and barge units." This type of tug is designed to fit into a notch at the stern of a barge, in effect making the whole tug/barge combination a single vessel.

River towboats. Flat on the bow, these boats push barges ahead. Their design makes them unsuitable for sea-going duty, but perfect for the complicated navigation and close-quarters maneuvering required on rivers. Pictured on the right above is a river towboat pushing several barges ahead on the Columbia River.

Specialized tugs. Some tugs are designed for specific jobs, such as firefighting, escorting oil tankers, or towing MODUs (floating oil rigs).

In The News: Israel Seizes Ship Smuggling Weapons

Francop Second German Ship Caught With Hizbullah-bound Weapons. The ship is German owned, but sails under the flag of Antigua and Barbuda. The crew was unaware they were carrying weapons, which were hidden under layers of normal commercial goods. This story from the Jerusalem Post.

Mariners In Review: Looking For A Ship

Looking For A Ship is John McPhee's 1990 slice-of-life look at the American merchant marine of that time and has become a classic of the genre. McPhee begins by following second mate Andy Chase from union hall to union hall "looking for a ship," that is trying to find work at sea. When Andy finally finds a berth on the freighter Stella Lykes, bound for South America, McPhee switches the spotlight to the ship's captain, Paul McHenry Washburn, following him and the ship to various ports in South America.

Looking For A Ship is in many ways a sea story about sea stories. After quoting a crewman who complains about guys telling sea stories (opining that some of them would have to be 200 years old for all their stories to be true), McPhee then goes on to tell sea story after sea story, by and about the crew members on the Stella Lykes. Mariners will recognize the type, if not the particulars of each story: the salty old characters, the gruesome accidents, the hilarious misadventures.

The book is at its strongest, though, when it recounts the facts of life in the modern merchant marine and the effects of those facts on the crew. Large ships with 50+ crew not so long ago are now manned by 20 or so senior citizens; you can almost hear the lonely foot-treads on the deck as the American merchant marine shrinks and American merchant mariners fade away. If anything it's more true today then twenty years ago when Looking For A Ship was first published. This sense of nostalgia is the book's most poignant aspect. As McPhee quotes Washburn

A lot of us who have put our lives into this thing don't want to see the Merchant Marine die. It is not only worthwhile but necessary. Every hundred million the government has pulled out of Merchant Marine subsidies has probably cost billions in mounting trade deficits. We pay other flags, including Russia [the Soviet Union at the time Looking For A Ship was published], millions of dollars to deliver our foreign aid: rice, flour, vegetable oil, powdered milk, tanks, jeeps. By law, fifty per cent is supposed to go on American ships, but we don't have the bottoms. Some years, we carry five per cent. Even so, our shipping companies are more dependent on foreign aid than the foreigners we aid. We have not only one of the smallest but also one of the most aged merchant marines. Most of our ships are beyond their normal life expectancy. American shipyards have been folding, and their skills with them. The shipyards that remain are essentially repair yards -- Bath, Newport News, Chester, Pascagoula. That's it. That's all she wrote, hoss.

The book is at its weakest when McPhee shows us the landlubber he really is. He is obsessed with "how deep is it here?" and with satellite navigation. He falls back heavily on his nature writing style (look for this book in the Nature section of the bookstore with McPhee's other works) to describe the landscape and quotes Charles Darwin at length. Nothing wrong with Charles Darwin; it's just that merchant seamen are engaged in trade and little concern themselves with the history, natural or human, of the areas they sail in. McPhee is downright credulous when it comes to many of the sea stories he hears: the second mate is a descendent of and owns the sextant owned by Nathaniel Bowditch; the captain is a descendent of former Chief Justice John Marshall and Ulysses S. Grant's secretary of state. And both these guys just happen to be on the ship John McPhee is on? Come on.

McPhee also looks at other working mariners, among others, in his 2006 book, Uncommon Carriers. More on McPhee at his website here.

See also my recommendations for additional reading at my post reviewing Steaming to Bamboola.

In The News: Navy Ship A 9/11 Legacy; Australian rescue; cruise ship clears Danish bridge

Navy Ship A 9/11 Legacy. The USS New York (pictured above) was partially built with steel salvaged from the World Trade Center, according to this video from CNN.

Rescue Under Way After Boat Sinks Off Australia. This story from msnbc. Two merchant ships, including an LNG tanker, are part of the rescue effort. Law and tradition of the sea require ships in the area to help a vessel in distress; cargo contracts and passenger tickets all exempt ship owners and captains if your cargo or you get held up by rescue operations.

Oasis Of The Seas Clears Crucial Obstacle. An update on the progress of the world's largest cruise ship from msnbc.

An "Alternative" Look at Somali Pirates

One of the purposes of this blog is to set the record straight on maritime topics as they are reported in the media, and I freely admit that most of my sources are what you would call "mainstream media." I just happened to pick up the collection called Censored 2010: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2008-09 edited by Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff and found the #2 most underreported story of the year -- in the editors' view, anyway -- is "Toxic Waste Behind Somali Pirates." The article paints an interesting picture of the origins of the pirates: that they started out as local fisherman defending their home waters from toxic waste dumpers and illegal fishermen from other countries that moved in when the Somali government collapsed, thus leaving the country's waters undefended.

The annual Censored collection has a definite point of view. The introduction to this year's volume, by freelance journalist Dahr Jamail, is largely a condemnation of Israeli actions in Gaza. The editors openly declare

In the thirty-three years of Project Censored, the absence of real news from corporate media has never been more complete. Lies, deception, propaganda, superficial coverage, and overt censorship are on the rise. We cannot be polite about this anymore. Corporate media is irrelevant to working people and destructive to democracy. Look elsewhere for real news, as you won't find it in the mainstream press.

A definite point a view indeed, one I don't completely agree with. "Alternative" news outlets definitely play an important role, though, and I don't want to disregard that on this blog.

In terms of the Somali pirates story, I would say at least two of the three sources cited by the Censored editors -- Al Jazeera and The Huffington Post -- are "mainstream," if not traditional, news outlets. The three sources Project Censored cites are

"Toxic Waste" Behind Somali Piracy by Najad Abdullahi of Al Jazeera English.

You Are Being Lied To About Pirates by London Independent columnist Johann Hari in The Huffington Post.

The Two Piracies In Somalia: Why The World Ignores The Other? by Mohamed Abshir Waldo on the Somali news website Wardheer News.