"I understand you've already sold them," the coordinator said into the phone, his voice flat. "I understand customers are waiting. But I've got a chemical plant in Louisiana that shuts down in two days without this feedstock, and when that plant shuts down, four hundred people go home. So your living room sets are going to sit here a while longer."

He hung up. Looked at his spreadsheet. Crossed off another line.

It was October 15, 2025, and the Mississippi River at Memphis was reading minus 8 feet. The logistics coordinator—mid-fifties, worked his way up from warehouse operations, still drinks coffee from a union hall mug though the union's long gone—had been making calls like this since September 21, when the Coast Guard email came through at 6:47 AM: draft restrictions between Cairo and Lake Providence, 10 feet maximum, six barges wide.

He'd been doing this job for eleven years. He knew what the numbers meant before the phone started ringing.

Three Screens

Three monitors on his desk at the port operations center. Left screen: real-time river levels from NOAA. Middle screen: the day's manifest—what's supposed to move, what's already loaded, what's waiting. Right screen: email and phone logs that by mid-morning looked like a disaster.

A 10-foot draft limit means every barge carries less. You can't load them deep when the water's shallow—physics, not policy. A standard barge that normally draws 12 feet now leaves 15-20% of its capacity on the dock. Memphis handles 500 million tons annually. That percentage doesn't vanish. It sits there, waiting for someone to explain why it's not moving.

He calls it triage. Corporate calls it "capacity optimization."

The furniture distributor called back an hour later. Different tactic this time—mentioned the contract penalties, the retail chain that might pull future business, the quarterly numbers.

"Look," he said, "I get it. But here's what I'm looking at: medical supplies, food shipments, industrial components that keep factories running. Your furniture is consumer goods. Nice furniture, I'm sure. But it's not keeping a production line from stopping."

Silence on the other end. Then: "So when?"

"When the river rises or when I run out of higher priorities. Probably the river."

The File That Gets Thicker

He has a file folder labeled "Low Water Protocols" that's gotten thicker every year. First time the Mississippi hit these levels, maybe 2012, everyone acted surprised. Now he's got protocols for minus 8 feet, minus 10 feet, minus 12 feet. Contact lists for who to call when shipments get bumped.

This isn't emergency response anymore. This is normal operations.

"Back in 2014," he said during a break between calls, "I could usually find a workaround. Rail had spare capacity, trucks could pick up overflow, river delays were temporary. Now? Rail's running at capacity. Truck rates are through the roof. And the river drops every year."

He pulled up an email from corporate. Subject line: "Resilience and Adaptability in Challenging Conditions." It arrived the same morning he started bumping shipments.

"They sent this out to customers," he said. "All about our 'robust multi-modal infrastructure' and 'flexible routing options.' You know what flexible routing means when the river's at minus 8 feet? It means I'm on the phone explaining why their stuff isn't moving."

Memphis advertises itself as a logistics hub with access to 45 states within two days. Five Class I railroads, major highways, the river, the airport. Redundancy, they call it.

The coordinator laughed when I mentioned redundancy.

He showed me the rail congestion map. Red lines everywhere. BNSF just rolled out a new truck check-in system to reduce congestion at their Memphis intermodal facility.

"That's great," he said. "But you can't check-in your way out of insufficient rainfall in the Ohio River basin."

The whole system runs optimized for normal conditions. When conditions aren't normal, there's nowhere for the overflow to go. The backup plan is him, with a spreadsheet and a phone, explaining to people why their stuff is sitting on a dock in Memphis.

By mid-October, his spreadsheet had grown to 200 lines. Shipments waiting, shipments bumped, shipments rerouted, shipments cancelled. He'd stopped taking lunch breaks.

"First time this happened, we thought it was a fluke," he said. "Now I'm planning for next year's low water before this year's is over."

He's already thinking about 2026. The Mississippi has hit record lows in recent years, and each time the protocols get refined, the contact lists get updated, the expectations get adjusted.

He mentioned the Panama Canal—daily transits dropped from 36-38 vessels to just 18 during the 2023-2024 drought. Some ships rerouted and never came back.

"That's what worries me," he said. "Not this drought. The next one. Because every time this happens, some customers find alternatives. And some of those alternatives stick. You lose enough customers, you lose the volume that justifies the infrastructure. Then the whole thing starts to spiral."

He doesn't think the river will be reliable by next fall. He's already talking to rail about additional capacity that probably won't exist. Already warning customers that September-October might just be low-water season now, plan accordingly.

"People ask me how I decide who gets priority," he said. "Like there's some wisdom to it. There's no wisdom. There's contracts and penalties and phone calls and trying to figure out who's actually going to suffer versus who's just going to be inconvenienced. And knowing that whatever I decide, someone's going to be pissed off."

The phone rang. Soybean shipper, third call that day. Harvest sitting in elevators, Chinese market already gone, now the river's too low to move what's left to other buyers. The coordinator pulled up the contract, checked the penalties, made a note.

Soybeans move—food generally does.

He hung up. Looked at the spreadsheet. Two hundred lines of things that need to move and water that's too low to move them.

The river will rise again. It always does. The restrictions will lift, the backlog will clear, mostly. And everyone will go back to pretending the system works exactly as designed.

Until next September when the water drops and he pulls out the protocols and starts making calls again.

He's already assuming next year will be worse. Already planning for minus 10 feet, minus 12 feet. Already thinking about what happens when the workarounds run out and the backup plans are all exhausted and it's just him with a spreadsheet, deciding what moves and what waits.

The phone's ringing again.