Washington Watch
Barging goes viral via the post office
Pamela Glass
October 4, 2012The U.S. Postal Service has the problem licked.
It is one of the very few departments of the U.S. government (and never mind that it is actually an independent agency of the government) that seems to acknowledge the important contributions of the barge industry.
Source: U.S. Postal Service
In selecting a series of photos that depict the diversity of the U.S. landscape to adorn a new set of Forever stamps, postal officials picked an image of a barging operation in Texas.
It shows an aerial view of the Kirby Corp. towboat Apollo andEnterprise Marine Service LLC’s towboat Taurus positioning themselves against liquid tank barges in the Old River barge fleeting area near the Houston Ship Channel. Officials from Kirby and the USPS launched the stamps at a press conference Monday at Kirby’s Old River fleet in Channelview, Texas. For the USPS, it kicked off October as National Stamp Collecting month by issuing its Earthscapes Forever stamps.
In addition to the towboats, this Earthscapes series shows images of a cranberry harvest, a volcanic crater, an inland marsh, and a glacier – all taken from ultralight aircraft to earth-observing satellites, anywhere from several hundred feet to several hundred miles up in space. It’s pretty colorful and pretty cool.
Not only do the towboat stamps sit beside handsome images of nature, but the towboat image is also beside artistic images of other transportation modes — a highway interchange looking like strings of spaghetti and a railroad roundhouse that looks like an antique clock.
It’s gratifying to see that at least the postal service recognizes barging as an important part of the national transportation network along with railroads and highways. Perhaps using these stamps should be required by other branches of government — like the Transportation Department, the Congress and the Office of Management and the Budget — that haven’t yet given waterways a the significant stamp of approval it deserves.
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