Lake St. Peter is too shallow: how a section of the St. Lawrence has rendered Montreal's port obsolete

  Lake St. Peter, aka Lac Saint-Pierre, is different from most lakes insofar as it sits in the middle of a river, namely our St. Lawrence River, the lifeline to Montreal's traditional meal-ticket as a booming port city.

   Lake St. Peter just east of Sorel, appeared 12,500 years ago when a glacier melted, leaving a massive watery gap 32 km long by 14 km wide.

   The problem? The glacier was too thin.  As a result, the lake bed measured 10 feet deep until it was dredged to 35 feet. 

   Problem is that large container ships need 55 feet of depth to navigate an aquatic route. 

   So thanks to Lake St. Peter the river that has long served as Montreal's moneymaker is 20-feet too shallow to be useful. 

   Today's container ships dwarf the ships that came into Montreal during its thriving era. 

   The Manchester Challenge was the first container ship in Montreal in the 1960s. It had a 500 TEU (twenty-foot equivalent unit) which meant it could haul 500 containers. 

   The average container ship nowadays is 20-times that size, at 10,000 TEU. 

   In 2008 the largest container ship was a massive 14,000 TEU but even that has been outstripped by 23,000 TEU ships.

   Fully-laden, these ships simply cannot make it to Montreal due to the shallow Lake St. Peter.
   So what's the maximum-sized ships that can come into Montreal harbour? I asked veteran shipping journalist Christy McCormick.

It has been reckoned at 3,500 TEU in late hot summer low water and 4,500 TEU at high water in the spring. Bigger ships in the 5,500 TEU range can get in if they are not fully laden, which they often aren't, being at the end of their run with the last of their cargo to discharge and the first of their cargo to load on the backhaul port to port rotation.

     The Panama Canal, in recent years, has been widened to allow the larger ships, further pushing Montreal's port into irrelevance. 

   So this raises the obvious question which has been asked for about 60-years: 

   Why not dredge Lake St. Peter to deepen it so ships can get through? 

World's largest containership has a TEU of almost 24k TEU

   Lake St. Peter has already been dredged to reach 35 feet but the problem is that the more you dredge, the more water flows upriver from the Great Lakes, so the water level doesn't rise much with dredging.

   One would need a complex and costly engineering solution, which would likely not make much economic sense.

   Quebec City had a larger population than Montreal before Montreal built a better port in the 1800s.

   Quebec and other ports east are now getting their revenge.

    McCormick, who spent many years reporting on Montreal's waterfront trade, notes that not all is disaster for Montreal, which has nonetheless seen its tonnage rise significantly through the years.  "Montreal," he notes,"still prospers as the most convenient access to one of the richest consumer markets - the Quebec-Windsor corridor - on the planet." 

    McCormick notes that many incorrectly assume all trade goes from China to the West coast of the North America.  He adds:

    High quality still comes from Europe and Britain. Hamburg has much the same problem as we do, in the Elbe, but less severe.

The Suez Canal has also helped Montreal tonnage too, via "wayporting", that is dropping off Montreal-bound cargo at ports in the Red Sea and the Med and having smaller box ships pick it up and move it on. With highly efficient terminals this can be done quickly and economically. So 23,000-TEUer could be heading for the Northern Range (Le Havre, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Hamburg and Felixstowe) and drop off 1,000 TEU for Montreal - that is twice the load of the first containership that came to Montreal in 1970.
       I would say this world has changed more in the last 10 years than in the previous 50.

1965 Gazette