0600: The summer sun greets Ohioans as they rise, but along Ohio's Lake Erie shoreline, the crews on U.S.- Flag "lakers" have been hard at work throughout the night. In Cleveland's Cuyahoga River, the FRED R. WHITE, JR. has just finished discharging 20,000 tons of iron ore pellets to feed LTV Steel's insatiable blast furnaces. In Fairport Harbor, the PHILIP R. CLARKE is taking on more than 27,000 tons of salt that will tame Buffalo's harsh winters.
Over in Conneaut, once deckhands finish securing the cargo hatches on the
1,000-foot-long JAMES R. BARKER, 45,000 tons of coal will begin the 54-hour
journey to a power plant in Marquette, Michigan. Across the slip, a mountain
of limestone is forming under the AMERICAN MARINER's unloading boom.
Similar scenes are taking place in Toledo, Sandusky, Marblehead, Huron, Lorain and Ashtabula, and will, almost without pause, from early March until early January. With just a 10-month shipping season for dry-bulk cargos (a few double-hulled tankers operate year-round), the lakers that transport Ohio's raw materials operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. But when winter closes the dry-bulk trades, lakers will have delivered and loaded more than 55 million tons of cargo at Ohio's Lake Erie ports, the equivalent of 5.1 tons for each resident of the Buckeye state.
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