MT. VERNON, Ill. — Growers attending the annual Winter Wheat Forum in southern Illinois received an eye-opening message from the federal official overseeing operations of the Mississippi River in the region: Drought conditions left officials last month within hours of shutting down the nation’s largest inland shipping lane.

And what remained open – a federally mandated channel 300 feet wide with a depth of 9 feet – wasn’t as safe a passage for most of the 20-container barges that needed to go through the much-narrowed waterway, said Andrew Schimpf, operations manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ St. Louis District.

He was one of the keynote speakers during last week’s wheat forum, saying he probably shouldn’t admit he believes a 300-foot-wide channel for barges isn’t as safe a passage as it should be for shipping.

“I probably will get in trouble for saying this, but I’d suggest there should be an adjustment to federal regulations because a 300 (wide) by 9 (deep) channel is not a very safe channel. It’s not the ideal,” said Schimpf. He also played a video that showed the difficulty a barge had in navigating part of the lower Mississippi River in January.

The Corps so far has spent about $32 million on dredging and emergency rock removal between June 2012 and January, to help keep barge traffic flowing. Within the 180-mile stretch between St. Louis and Cairo, Ill., the Corps has spent in excess of $10 million for the removal of rock pinnacles near Thebes and Grand Tower, Ill.

It was money the Corps didn’t have budgeted, but borrowed from other projects, said Mike Petersen, a Corps spokesman from the St. Louis District. In a normal year, the Corps will spend about $12 million on dredging the upper and lower 1,820 miles of the Mississippi, Schimpf added. This year, more than 8 million cubic yards of sediment was dredged using machines that cost about $100,000 a day to operate.

Barge traffic never was shut down completely south of St. Louis, but traffic was limited at times to one-way passage through narrow channels and most tows were cut in half by weight, Schimpf said.

“We’re in much better shape now, thanks to the dredging work done and to the rock removal, but also to Mother Nature, because the rain we’ve received during the past two weeks has helped raise the water level of the river by seven feet in some spots,” he explained. “We’re not out of the woods totally, yet, but we’re certainly in better shape than we were.”

The Corps maintains a series of 29 locks and dams along the Mississippi, along with eight locks and dams along the Illinois river, all to help keep barges of grain, fuel, machinery and chemicals moving through the world’s third-largest river basin behind the Amazon and Congo, Schimpf said.

Last year, nearly 107.1 million tons of goods were shipped on the Mississippi, valued in excess of $110 billion. Petersen said it is likely that later this fall, river levels may remain low, thereby threatening continuous shipping again.

“There’s not a lot that can prevent it (low-water levels), because it’s a lack of rain. Unless we can engineer to make rain, it’s likely to be something we’ll run into again. We’re still in a drought,” Petersen said.

Late last month, U.S. Sens. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) announced the creation of a Mississippi River Caucus. “We learned a vital lesson this past fall when a potential disruption in navigation along the Mississippi threatened everything from increasing the cost to move goods to potential job losses,” Harkin said.

“The Mississippi River Caucus will look at ways that Congress can be helpful to the cities and towns along the river to improve their economies and their qualities of life, and to better respond to floods and other threats.”