Sunday night the PBS NewsHour ran a helpful overview of how upstream drought has squeezed midstream flows to seriously reduce downstream discharge on the Mississippi River (more). The story offers an especially helpful comparison of capacity differences between barge, rail, and trucking alternatives (full story is eight minutes). Per the river gauge at Memphis, a slight recovery of still-very-low water levels during October’s second half of has now reversed (see chart below). The World Economic Forum recently updated its report of reduced flows on the Amazon, Rhine, Mississippi, and Yangtze. This blog has continued to watch as throughput at the Panama Canal is cut (more and more).
