Brief by Central Staff
Arkansas River – September 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
For those of us familiar with only the uppermost portion of the 1,459-mile Arkansas River, the news of May 26 was close to astonishing. Up here (especially this year), the river won’t carry anything bigger than a 20-foot raft, but in Oklahoma the river was big enough to support barges — including one that hit a bridge support.
The empty barge was traveling north at about 5 mph, and hit one of the supports beneath a 1,988-foot bridge on Interstate 40 that spanned the Arkansas near Webber’s Falls, Okla. A section of the bridge collapsed into the water, but some unfortunate motorists didn’t notice in time.
“It was just one car after another hitting the end of the bridge at 70 mph. Nobody could see that the bridge was gone,” witness Norman Barton told CNN.
At least 10 vehicles fell 62 feet into the water, and 14 bodies have been recovered.
How did the Arkansas get big enough to support barge traffic?
For one thing, they get a lot more rain downstream, on the other side of the 100th Meridian (Arkansas averages 72 inches a year; Colorado 15). But even at that, the river was almost impossible to navigate until the federal government stepped in.
That goes back to the 1950s and powerful Oklahoma Sen. Robert S. Kerr, who wanted a seaport in his landlocked state. And so, over the years, the Army Corps of Engineers built 17 locks and dams along 448 miles of the Arkansas River Navigation Project.
It starts in Arkansas where the White River meets the Mississippi. It follows the White for 10 miles, then 10 miles of man-made Arkansas Post Canal to join the Arkansas, which it follows to Muskogee, Okla., then proceeds up the Verdigris River for 50 miles to reach the head of navigation at Catoosa, near Tulsa.
The project maintains a minimum channel depth of 9 feet, and each lock chamber is 110 feet wide and 600 feet long. Together, the locks lift a barge 420 feet in a 448-mile trip from the Mississippi to Tulsa.
It opened in late 1970, and the full “McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System” was dedicated at Catoosa on June 5, 1971, by President Richard M. Nixon.
That’s how the bottom end of the Arkansas got big enough to carry commercial barges, and for our part, we’re glad it stopped at Tulsa — we prefer a flowing river to a string of slackwater lakes, and nothing that we float on the river is big enough to hurt a bridge support.