The sands of time: shallow funding prevents dredging from pacing nature, causing commerce to ebb on the Intracoastal Waterway.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: COVER STORY

It's usually sunrise, not midmorning, when the Silverado leaves Carolina Beach for waters around Frying Pan Shoals. But the fishermen aboard, who had driven from Greensboro and spent the night at a motel to get an early start, don't complain. Captain Dennis Barbour has explained that Carolina Beach Inlet, his access from the Intracoastal Waterway to the ocean, has become so shallow his charter boat must catch a favorable tide. Still, he scowls as he eases the throttle forward and picks up speed. Breakfast, not brunch, is the time to be baiting up.

Barbour isn't the only disgruntled waterman on the Tar Heel coast. On Albemarle Sound, Bos Smith complains of a "critical lack of navigable depth" in the inland waterway--barely 41/2 feet in many places. He's operations manager of a barge company that transports wood pulp and other cargo. "We can only partially load our smallest barges. A fully loaded jumbo barge would get stuck in the mud." But half-loads slash profits, one reason many barge companies have gone out of business. Even recreational boaters run aground.

This is the plight of North Carolina's leg of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway and the inlets that are its off-ramps to the sea. It meanders more than 300 miles from the marshes of Calabash on the South Carolina line, crossing sounds and bays, snaking up and down creeks and rivers and through ditchlike channels such as the Alligator-Pungo River Canal in Hyde County before exiting the dark, forest-lined Great Dismal Swamp Canal and parallel Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal bordering Virginia's Hampton Roads region. Its diverse sections share one thing--they are in trouble.

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Nature is strangling the waterway, and despite its commercial and recreational value--a 2006 state study attributed $257 million in annual sales and 4,000 jobs paying $124 million a year--politicians are neglecting it. Once a major shipping route for petroleum, wood, agricultural products and other heavy, bulky materials, its barge traffic peaked decades ago, says UNC Wilmington economist Chris Dumas, one of the authors of a new economic-impact study for the Oak Island-based North Carolina Beach, Inlet and Waterway Association. Some sections carried 5 million tons of cargo a year, says Frank Reynolds, an economist with the Army Corps of Engineers in Wilmington. The latest figures show the most heavily used stretch, between the Pamlico and Neuse rivers, moving just 1.5 million tons.

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Some of the decline can be laid to increased competition from truck and rail. But the waterway remains vital to users such as Nucor Corp., which sends scrap metal to feed its steel mill in Tunis by barge, the same way PCS Phosphate Co. ships production from the world's largest phosphate mining/processing operation in Aurora to the port at Morehead City. So important a role does the Intracoastal and its inlets play--PCS alone is estimated to contribute $800 million to the surrounding economy--that the state and some beach towns have been kicking in about $1.5 million a year for the Corps to expand dredging, a federal responsibility. Even with a boost from the economic-stimulus package--the North Carolina section gets about $4.4 million--this year's federal budget for dredging it totals less than $5.7 million. Lobbyists figure $17 million is needed to deepen it to the standard 12 feet.

It's a chicken-or-the-egg dilemma: Federal appropriations depend largely on shipping volume, and Tar Heel...