PEORIA, Ill. – Eleven South Korean grain buyers waited patiently at the Peoria Lock and Dam on the Illinois River on a blustery, cool late-April morning, hoping to see a barge pass through the nearly century old structure. The 600-foot lock, one of 27 located on the Mississippi River waterway system between St. Paul and New Orleans, underwent crucial repairs in 2020 but still lacks the necessary capacity to accommodate fully loaded barges.

Though the foreign buyers’ patience wasn’t rewarded with a barge lock-through, the Korean contingent learned plenty about how Peoria’s rare, antiquated wicket-style dam operates and the need for continued infrastructure improvements on the waterway, which is essential to the movement of Midwest agricultural products to world markets.

“Most of our towboats are longer than 600 feet; we call that a double-lock hitch,” Peoria Lock and Dam lockmaster Matt Traver told the contingent of Korean grain buyers who represented four major food buyers for Korean and other Asian Pacific markets. “A lot of our grain barges are 15 barges long, or about 1,140 feet. We will bring (them in) and tie them off to the wall, then actually uncouple six barges and the towboat and back them out of the lock chamber. Then we’ll shut the gates and drop them down.

“Because those first six barges aren’t attached to a towboat, we have to pull them out with a winch. We will then re-open the gates and repeat the process, then tie everything back together before they can head on downstream. This process can take two to three hours.”

The decoupling and recoupling process can take twice as long when winter ice is prevalent in the river. On a normal day at the Peoria Lock and Dam, at least six hours are spent daily decoupling and recoupling barges due to the antiquated size of the lock passage. The cost of labor for barge workers and lock and dam employees during these downtimes is eventually passed on to the end users of the products being shipped.

“If you think about another couple of hours at every lock between St. Paul, Minn., and (the Gulf of Mexico), that’s days of time, and this is costing these barge companies something probably in the order of $20,000 per day,” said Thomas Heinold, chief of operations for the Army Corps of Engineers Rock Island District, who supervised the Peoria visit. “We’re talking about fuel, maintenance, food, salaries for the towboat operators and deckhands…time is money.”

The constant decoupling-recoupling process also puts undue stress on all moving parts of the circa-1938 structure, which is one of only three wicket-type dams still operating in the United States. “If we had a 1,200-foot lock chamber, it would be in-and-out,” Traver said.

Heinold noted that though the Peoria Lock and Dam will eventually receive an upgrade to a 1,200-ft lock chamber, construction will likely not occur until sometime in the 2030s at earliest.

During 2024, 21,417.3 metric tons of cargo were locked through the Peoria Lock and Dam, according to its lockmaster. These products included soybeans, corn, distillers dried grains and ethanol. Petroleum and chemicals are often sent upstream to the Joliet-Chicago area. 

“We have ADM, a huge ethanol plant, right upriver, so we get a lot of corn going in there and then DDGs and cattle feed headed south from there,” Traver said. “We also have across the river from here a railyard and elevators so they will load the barges there, configure them, and then head either up or down river.”

There are always at least two workers on site at the Peoria Lock and Dam 24-7. The secure government area cannot be visited by the public without clearance by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Rock Island, Illinois District. One of the jobs of the dam attendants is to ensure that the miter gates, which received an upgrade in 2024, continue to function as they should.

“We had a (separate) major overhaul in 2020 and they actually put bulkheads across the lock chamber, dewatered the lock chamber and did a bunch of preventive maintenance including new gate hinges and a lot of resurfacing,” Traver said.

The Korean grain buyers were in the Midwest to help inform their long-range purchasing decisions for their companies, according to Guy H. Allen, senior agricultural economist at Kansas State University, who served as tour guide and driver for the contingent. “They are here to buy for Korea primarily, but in the commodity market everything trades,” said Allen, who grew up in nearby Delavan, Ill.

Undeterred by not seeing a lock-through, Allen guided the visitors back into the extended passenger van to head to their next stop: the Melvin Price Lock and Dam on the Mississippi River at St. Louis.

“I’m confident we’ll see a lock-through there,” Allen said. “I usually have pretty good luck.”