Matt Rourke/AP Photo
The container ship Dali rests against the wreckage of the Francis Scott Key Bridge at the entrance to the Port of Baltimore, March 26, 2024, as seen from Dundalk, Maryland.
The Port of Baltimore was on a roll. In February, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore celebrated new record traffic at the vessel and terminal hub and installed a new executive director, Jonathan Daniels, at the Maryland Port Administration. The port already was an established leader in auto imports and exports, thanks to its closer proximity to the Midwest than other ports, and led the country in passenger vehicle shipping for 13 consecutive years.
The container ship crash and collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge pushed those milestones aside in seconds. Maryland faces a grim recovery mission for the men killed, and what promises to be one of the country’s most closely watched infrastructure projects at one of the East Coast’s busiest ports.
Like similar marine facilities, the Port of Baltimore plays an integral if ignored role in American life. Most people don’t spend much time thinking about ports unless a global pandemic strikes or vital transportation links tragically shut down. Now there’s an accident investigation, complex wreckage removal, including hazardous materials, cargo and vessel logistics, economic hits, and expectations to manage. “That has got to be the focus, getting our economic engine going and restoring a measure of pride to Baltimore and the state of Maryland, because this port is a huge point of pride that we have for our state,” Moore, a Democrat, told Fox 5, the metro Washington affiliate, Wednesday morning.
The Port of Baltimore, which houses state-owned and private marine terminals, falls into the category of small but mighty. Baltimore is the ninth-busiest port in the country for international cargo and the 17th-largest overall. In fiscal year 2023, the public terminals handled nearly 12 million tons of general cargo, setting a new record for the facility. The 52.3 million tons of international cargo the facility handled also set records. Though container cargo constitutes most of the activity through the port, it does not have the container traffic of New York/New Jersey or Norfolk, Virginia.
“It’s a short, sharp, localized shock,” says Chris Caplice, executive director of MIT’s Center for Transportation and Logistics. The national impact, he believes, will be “minimal.”
Where the loss of the port—closed indefinitely to vessel traffic—will be felt is as an import/ export port of entry for passenger vehicles, as well as construction and farm equipment. Forbes reported that automakers are already planning to use alternative locations like Brunswick, Georgia, the second-largest facility for cars and other vehicles, along with Newark and Jacksonville. Like Baltimore, those ports can handle the types of ships that transport vehicles.
Other products often seen at the port include gypsum (used in fertilizer and certain construction products like drywall), lumber, steel, and coal. “It’ll take a little longer time for coal to adjust because that’s going to be shifted down to Norfolk, that’s mainly on rail anyway,” says Caplice. In addition, there are about a dozen container ships that are stuck inside the harbor, and efforts will have to be made to allow them a way out or unload them to another mode of transportation.
Some 15,330 jobs held by longshoremen, drivers for trucking firms, freight forwarders, and others will be directly affected.
Most state transportation executives do not expect to have to handle a major catastrophe after only a few weeks in a new role. That experience should prove instructive for Daniels, the new ports chief who started work on February 5. He came to Maryland from Port Everglades in Broward County, Florida’s largest container port, and the 14th-busiest in the country, where he devised new container traffic and cruise line investments. Before he landed in Florida, Daniels helped complete a $570 million Port of Gulfport, Mississippi, reconstruction and expansion project launched after Hurricane Katrina inflicted major damage on the facility.
In an interview shortly before his arrival in Maryland, Daniels trumpeted his ability to get the cruise industry back on track after the pandemic, bringing in new cruise lines and upgrading the terminal for existing operators. He expressed interest in boosting the industry in Baltimore, a project that will demand a creative approach given the scale of the disruption. Three ocean cruise lines operate out of Baltimore: Norwegian Cruise Line, Carnival Legend, and Royal Caribbean International. He will also be tasked with a multimillion-dollar project that’s already under way, a rail tunnel expansion that will allow double stacked containers to move in and out of the port.
“I stepped outside my comfort zone,” Daniels told Seatrade Cruise News about his role in Florida. “Every single day during the pandemic, we were forced to react, not only to our ports but to the impact on a global scale. We were trying to survive,” he said.
Managing the post-accident Port of Baltimore will be a similar exercise in crisis management. “You have to think about the inbound and the outbound,” says Caplice. “Getting some kind of channel through the port so that ships that are captive can get out—and then think about ‘what can I do for the land side?’” Companies have already moved quickly to come up with alternatives, he adds. “They’re diverting, they’re doing this because that’s what decentralized supply chains are really good at doing.”
Perhaps the biggest impact is to Baltimore itself, a city that didn’t need another challenge. Some 15,330 jobs held by longshoremen, drivers for trucking firms, freight forwarders, and others will be directly affected. Roughly 140,000 other employees work in business associated with the facility, which pulls in about $400 million in annual state and local tax revenues. Revenue losses could run as much as $15 million a day.
In interviews with The Washington Post, Baltimore residents expressed fears about yet another economic hit to a city trying to hold its own in the post-pandemic era. The downtown core already suffers like other city centers in the work-from-home transition that has shuttered office buildings. The pavilions of the once-popular Inner Harbor, the 1980s-era mecca of shops and restaurants that were a major destination for locals and tourists, are slated to be demolished.
Regional transportation is in many ways a bigger challenge than the one facing companies dealing with cargo and port logistics. Trucks carrying hazardous cargo, which cannot use the city’s tunnels, used the Key Bridge. But they are being rerouted around the city.
Commuters, especially ones north of the bridge headed for Washington, are in a worse situation. “Longer term, supply chains will adjust for freight,” says Caplice, “[but] the local people, the passenger travel around there—I would not want to be driving and commuting into D.C. at this point.”
President Biden has promised federal assistance for a new bridge, in what is bound to be a painful election-year exercise featuring House Republicans with no interest in any national priorities. Then there are the armchair engineers who cite Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s two-week restoration of temporary highway lanes on Interstate 95 in Philadelphia as a model for Baltimore. (The permanent lanes and associated structural supports on that stretch of road will be completed this summer, one year after the accident.)
A get-it-done-yesterday mindset fails to appreciate that designing, securing contracts, and constructing a nearly two-mile-long bridge means years of work. Completed in 1977, the Key Bridge took five years to build. When Tampa’s Sunshine Skyway Bridge collapsed in 1980, the replacement span opened seven years later. “If they make it incentive-based contracting, it will go much faster,” says Caplice. “But this is such a big bridge.”
