River port moves forward

A riverport in Columbiana County, Ohio, has gotten money to build a dock to load limestone onto barges. The limestone is used for scrubbers at power plants. Here's one story about it, and here's another.

mv. Omar on the Mississippi

Thank you, Jeffery Manning, for sending photos (via Facebook) of the towboat Omar on the Upper Miss last year. Jeffery saw my blog post yesterday about how the Omar was in my area on the Ohio yesterday but I didn't get to see it. I haven't seen the Omar in maybe 20 years.

So here are four of the photos he sent along. Blogger is giving me a hard time about uploading the fifth for some reason. Remember, these photos are the property of Jeffery Manning and are used here solely for purposes of this blog by his permission. They are not to be dowloaded or stored or used or anything like that without his permission.

Thanks, Jeffery.

I never set foot on the Omar, but I did get aboard its twin, the Omega, once. The Omega is now the Erna E. Honeycutt, and it spends all its time on the Mississippi, the lower Ohio and that area -- never up here.

For what it's worth, the Omar shares its name with a small coal mining community in Logan County, W.Va. I've driven through there a few times, but never stopped. I don't know if Omar, W.Va., got its name from a coal company or vice versa.