Locks · Mississippi River

Mel Price Lock and Dam: 44% of tows wait over an hour

The typical tow waited 53 minutes. That is the 20th longest median wait of 173 locks, and nobody waited half a day.

Lock Wait · Lockages from 4 September to 4 October 2026 · Published 5 October 2026

Mel Price Lock and Dam sits at mile 200.8 of the Mississippi River, at East Alton, Illinois. Between 4 September and 4 October 2026, 306 commercial tows locked through. The median one waited 0.89 hours, about 53 minutes, from arrival to the start of its lockage. That is the 20th longest median wait of the 173 locks with traffic in our archive.

A short wait that most tows pay

44% of commercial tows waited more than an hour. One in ten waited longer than 3 hours, and one in a hundred longer than 5. None waited twelve. The longest wait we recorded was 7 hours: the downbound Bowling Green, pushing 8 barges for Hines Furlong Line, arrived on 17 September. Across all 306 lockages, tows spent 362 hours waiting, about 15 days.

The pattern held all month. Weekly median waits ranged from 0.6 hours in the week ending 20 September to 1.2 hours in the week ending 13 September. The last week, ending 4 October, came in at 0.85 hours, so the usual end-of-data dip is small here.

Big tows, two chambers

The lock has two chambers. The main one is 1,200 by 110 feet, with a 24-foot lift, and opened in 1990. The median commercial tow pushed 11 barges. Mel Price ranks 31st of 173 by lockages and 15th by barges, with 2,843 barges in all. 55% of lockages carried the Corps' hazardous-cargo flag, which does not say what the cargo is. The busiest hour was 5 a.m., and the busiest day was Saturday 3 October, with 21 lockages.

Right now

At the last status report, early on 5 October, one tow was waiting and the Corps' own four-hour average delay was 9 minutes. Since live status began on 4 October, no more than three tows have waited at once. The live Mel Price page updates every 15 minutes.

Related

• American Commercial Barge Line: where its towboats locked through a top operator at Mel Price Lock and Dam
• Ingram Barge Company: where its towboats locked through a top operator at Mel Price Lock and Dam
• Kirby Inland Marine: where its towboats locked through a top operator at Mel Price Lock and Dam
• Mississippi River barge traffic: 30,242 barges through 28 locks every lock on the Mississippi River

Sources: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Lock Performance Monitoring System, archived by Lock Wait; chamber dimensions and opening year from the BTS National Transportation Atlas; operators from the USACE Waterborne Transportation Lines (2022) and FCC ship licences. Wait is measured from arrival to start of lockage. How every number is defined.