Historic flooding and rain entered the Midwest region in late December causing many residents to evacuate the area.
Homes destroyed, people dead, and production halted for many businesses including those near the Port of Catoosa.
One of the largest inland river-ports in the United States is currently waiting for water levels to decrease in order to get back to normal day to day operations.
72 companies who employ over 4,000 people have no ability to use the port at this time and must rely on alternate forms of transportation, such as trains and semi-trucks, in order to send and recieve some of Oklahoma’s most important cargo.
Port Catoosa deputy director, David Yarbrough, says some port authority officials are nervous because they can not predict when port activity will get back to normal.
“If a lock and damn goes down the way to Port of Catoosa one of 18, there’s 18 locks and damns, any one of those goes down we’re effectively out of business as far as navigations goes,” Yarbrough said.
Although the Port of Catoosa has seen business slow twice in 2015 due to high level flooding, Congress recently passed a budget increase of over $1 billion for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that will provide a much needed contingency plan for the port during times of expected flooding.
“We use to have preventative maintenance, budget woes have made it where we don’t do preventative maintenance. Now we have to do ‘fix when fail’ type of approach. So this money that they’ve gotten recently from congress, I’m sure that navigation will be applied to critical projects,” Yarbrough said.
