Integrity Opens Saginaw River Season; Superior Braces for Gales

Chris Izworski, reporting from Bay City for the Great Lakes Gazette, watched this past Sunday as the cement-carrying barge Integrity and her tug G.L. Ostrander pushed into the Saginaw River—the first vessel to arrive at the dock since winter. Integrity's hull now bears new Amrize billboards, marking fresh ownership as the navigation season officially awakens. The barge had been delayed along with other inbound traffic (Alpena and Iver Bright among them) by widespread flooding earlier this month that kept the river inaccessible. Now, with the gate open, the season's pulse quickens. Elsewhere on the system, the Northern Venture remains in graving dock #2 at Ontario Shipyards in Port Weller, undergoing repairs to her controllable pitch propeller following seasonal troubles. Meanwhile, a brand-new 76-foot tug named H.J. Lawson departed Montreal on April 24, bound for Sault Ste. Marie on her delivery voyage to the Detroit District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Lawson honors Harold J. Lawson, a 30-year USACE engineer; she is sister to the R.J. Pearce, delivered last December and named for a 35-year Soo Locks veteran. Water levels remain healthy across all five lakes, with Lake Ontario sitting 3.46 feet above low datum and Lake Erie at 2.69 feet. But Superior faces a gale warning through Tuesday afternoon as a deepening low pressure system swings northeast from the Great Plains toward the Upper Peninsula. Winds will gust to near 30 knots on Michigan, with waves building correspondingly. On the environmental front, Michigan and Wisconsin continue recovering from extreme rain-on-snow events that tested aging dam infrastructure—a stark reminder of what climate change delivers to the Great Lakes region. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, sided unanimously with Michigan Attorney General Nessel in her Line 5 jurisdiction dispute, keeping the Enbridge pipeline case in state court where oversight remains firm.