A Race to Capture a Bounty From Shipping
By KIM SEVERSON
Published: December 11, 2010
SAVANNAH, Ga. — Port officials here are racing to dig six feet of mud from the bottom of the Savannah River by 2014. In the world of major waterway expansions, that is an impossibly tight timeline.
Stephen Morton for The New York Times
Container ships at the Port of Savannah in Georgia. Officials hope to attract even bigger ones after a dredging project here and a widening of the Panama Canal are complete in 2014.
Few can recall a civic project in Georgia that has had more unified support.
Without the $625 million deepening project, a breed of huge ships loaded with foreign-made iPods, furniture and other goods that will soon be able to traverse a newly widened Panama Canal will head elsewhere. And with them would go potentially billions of dollars in business.
Like Savannah, other East Coast ports from New York to Miami are scrambling like shoppers at a post-Thanksgivingdoor-buster sale, trying to become the go-to port once the canal is widened.
“Everyone’s lined up, and the door is about to open,” said Bob Pertierra, vice president of supply chain development for the Metro Atlanta Chamber.
But the battle is especially fierce here in the South, where several ports are competing to become the region’s top destination for the superships. They hope to cash in on the biggest shift in the freight business since the 1950s, when oceangoing ships began carrying goods in uniform metal containers.
The Panama Canal, 48 miles of water connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, is undergoing a $5.25 billion expansion that is scheduled to be completed by Aug. 15, 2014, 100 years to the day after it opened.
In what has long been considered a speed bump for major shipping companies, the canal is too small to accommodate a class of superships that came on the scene in the 1980s and went into heavy use a decade later when China became a powerful exporter.
Some of the big ships can carry three times as many containers as the industry average. The expansion, though it still will not allow the canal to accommodate the largest of the ships, will enable products made in Asia to be sent directly to the East Coast instead of being unloaded on the West Coast and then sent east by train or truck.
A result could be a shift in business worth billions of dollars to ports, and big savings for companies like Ikea and Home Depot, which are always on the hunt for more efficient ways to serve shoppers in the Eastern third of the United States, where a majority of the population lives.
With so much on the line, the canal expansion has pitted city against city and is testing the mettle of lawmakers torn between their opposition to federal earmarks, which pay for the bulk of port projects, and the gold rush that is about to begin along their shorelines.
“If you can imagine the crowded three- or four-lane highway you’re driving on suddenly getting expanded to 12 lanes, you can picture what’s about to happen,” Mr. Pertierra said. “It’s a global shift.”
To capture some of the new traffic, almost every large East Coast port and those along the Gulf of Mexico have projects under way. Some ports that are too small to handle the giant ships are improving railroads and truck routes, making them more efficient in anticipation of an overall increase in the number of containers coming to the East.
Others want to dig deeper channels and become the leading port in their regions for companies operating the big vessels, including Savannah; Charleston, S. C.; Jacksonville, Fla.; and Miami.
Those projects, however, rely on a long process that requires Congressional approval, studies by the Army Corps of Engineers and, finally, a lot of federal money that usually comes as budget add-ons, or earmarks.
The fight over federal money has ports feuding like estranged brothers.
In an interview in his well-appointed office overlooking the Savannah port, Curtis Foltz, the executive director of the Georgia Port Authority, sounded as if he were the coach of a championship team talking about an underdog when Charleston’s expansion plans came up.
“We’ve never looked at Charleston as a competitor,” Mr. Foltz said. “All you have to do is look at the numbers. The stats speak for themselves.” His port is the fourth-largest in the country; Charleston is the 12th, according to the American Association of Port Authorities.
Nikki Haley, the incoming governor of South Carolina, is also on the offensive. “You now have a governor who does not like to lose,” she told a crowd at an annual dinner for the ports, which was held the same day last month that the Corps of Engineers announced the approval for the Savannah dredging. “Georgia has had their way with us for way too long, and I don’t have the patience to let it happen anymore.”
- 1
- 2
No comments:
Post a Comment