Drought Halts Traffic on Mississippi [1]

Weather.com - AP, Jim Suhr, 9/20/12

Barge Heading Southbound on the Mighty Mississippi

A barge eases southbound in a Mississippi River channel toward a lock that remained shut down Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2012, in Granite City, Ill., causing a traffic jam of dozens of tugboats and hundreds of barges.

GRANITE CITY, Ill. -- Crews scrambled to make repairs Wednesday near the busiest Mississippi River lock shut down because of damage blamed partly on the summer drought, snarling hundreds of barges and tugboats in a backlog that was growing worse by the hour.

Workers closed Lock 27 just north of St. Louis [2] last Saturday after discovering that a protection cell -- a vertical, rock-filled steel cylinder against which barges rub to help align them for proper entry into the lock -- had split open, spilling into the channel tons of the rock that ultimately obstructed passage.

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