Word: rivermen
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...crest touched 30.24 feet. Then, slowly, the waters crept back down the markers on the rivermen's gauges. But the flood, even as it fell, showed its awesome power. The suction of the receding waters pulled huge chunks of muck from the levees. On the Omaha shore, the river forced its way into sewer outlets and gushed out with enough strength to lift a truck-trailer off the street and to buckle 120 feet of concrete pavement. Army engineers quickly dropped a lattice of steel I-beams across the sewer outlets, then jammed up the barrier with sandbags...
...anywhere." But there are some obstacles: the hull actually rests on a barge which keeps the Goldenrod from sinking; the pilothouse teeters over the deck like a tilted crackerbox ("Haven't been up there in ten years"), and the towboat Wenonah has been steam-less so long that rivermen doubt whether she has more than one good whistle left...
Crude oil and other petroleum products make up 75% of the river's cargo. Most of it is upriver, and the oil barges return empty; rivermen are now talking of building oil barges with return-trip deck space for autos. The rest of the traffic is in other bulk products which do not have to be moved rapidly. Downriver, Pittsburgh and Chicago ship steel, the Twin Cities grain. Upriver come cotton, sulphur and scrap from the South, coffee and sisal from Latin America...
...Early this year the biggest sternwheeler of them all, Standard Oil's giant 276-ft. Sprague (rivermen called her "The Big Mama"), made her last trip down the river to become a floating museum at Vicksburg...
...Rivermen have a saying that Pittsburgh's Golden Triangle harbor-where the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers meet to form the Ohio-is "great for towboats but hell on showboats." It was hell last week on one of the biggest, whitest and trimmest of U.S. inland excursion steamers, the Island Queen...