He spent years navigating the Mississippi River’s strong current. When he headed down river at flood time, he had to push the barges lashed forward of his towboat harder, exceeding the speed of the rushing water with enough margin to permit steering the great flotilla.

When he headed upriver at flood time, he knew the growl of the tow’s diesels as they labored to move the great weight of the barges slowly upstream against the current’s flow.

So why not, he asked during a brief visit last Friday, convert that constant, awesome energy of the great river’s southward flow to generate electricity by using barge-mounted generators with paddle-wheel-style blades mounted on shafts connected to turbines?

No dams, no muss, no fuss.

He is 84-year-old K. C. Crawford who started on the Mississippi River as a teenage deckhand and, except for two years in the Navy during World War II, spent the rest of his working life there, the last 35 years as pilot and captain.

As a deckhand, mess boy (“We got shorthanded, I was the greenest hand there, so they sent me to the galley,” Crawford explained), mate, pilot and captain, Crawford grew to know well the ever-present, flowing power always beneath his decks.

And to realize its unutilized potential.

“I know it would work; it’s got to work. That current’s going to be there, 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” Crawford said. He said he had been thinking about how to harness the river’s power for over 30 years.

Crawford moved to Batesville 40 years ago, he told me, but working on the river 30 days on and 30 days off, and sometimes taking extra river work during his scheduled off time limited his connections in the community.

They built a home on Highway 35 North. His wife of 58 years died three years ago. Their three children are Zane, a minister in Houston; Vaughn, a Memphis accountant, and Rebecca, who owns an insurance agency in Hernando.

“’Dad, that’s so simple; if it would work, somebody would have already done something with it,’” one of Crawford’s children told him.

And they have.

Following Crawford’s visit, I searched the Internet and learned that Hydro Green Energy of Houston has permits pending for two projects in the Mississippi River totaling 20 megawatts, according to the publication EnergyBiz. (A megawatt would power about 1,000 homes).

“Hydro Green would suspend the turbines from the bottom of barges along the river,” EnergyBiz reported.

There it is, and that should please K. C. Crawford. Someone else has recognized the Mississippi River’s potential power and has a project under way to do something to capture it.

And if the Hydro Green Energy name sounds familiar, that may because in 2007 they received preliminary permits for water energy projects at north Mississippi’s flood control reservoirs. They plan to use traditional water energy technology with new hydrokinetic energy technologies.

Hydro Green is a “renewable energy project developer … that designs, builds and operates hydrokinetic power projects that generate electricity exclusively from moving water …,” according to its web site, www.hgenergy.com.

Hydro Green Energy’s technological innovations for harnessing the energy of moving water and the years of common sense observations of this veteran Mississippi River pilot have intersected. It’s bound to work!