Officials surveying flood damage in Duluth/Superior

Officials in the Duluth/Superior area are checking to see how badly their port was damaged by last month’s flooding.

When up to 10 inches of rain worked its ways through the rivers, streams and culverts in the Twin Ports area it took with it incredible amounts of debris. Chad Scott is co-owner of AMI Consulting Engineers in Superior. His office is located on the tip of Connors point, on the shore of one of the rivers flowing to Lake Superior. “We’ve seen peoples complete sheds with everything in them get picked up off and float on by, and buoys from some of the dams.”

Now that waters have calmed, Scott and his company will be inspecting the infrastructure of the harbor. That includes scanning slips for hull breaking debris and checking for failures in dock walls. Scott says most industrial dock walls were built to withstand a 100 year flood, “but a lot of them weren’t. A lot of them were just installed, and they weren’t designed by an engineer, and they weren’t designed heavy enough to be able to withstand those forces. So, we’re probably going to find a lot of other failures around.”

Jim Sharrow is Facilities Manager with the Duluth Seaway Port Authority. He says the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is in the process of surveying 17 miles of shipping channels to see if they’ve filled in. He expects only a few inches of new sediment… but near Superior’s Nemadji River, it’s a different story: “In this area outside of the Nemadji there are some places where 21 feet of sedimentation have occurred.”

Sharrow says shipping lanes are still open, however, and ships can use the Duluth entry if needed.