NYC ports stare down challenge of modernizing
NEWARK, N.J. — From ultra-thin laptops to drones to smartphones, the shelves of big-box retailers overflow with gadgets to help us communicate and conduct business at greater and greater speeds.
What’s largely unchanged is the way many of those goods arrive on those shelves, as they did in the era of the rotary phone and transistor radio.
It’s a supply chain fraught with the potential for disruption, particularly in the sprawling ports that hug Newark Bay just east of the New Jersey Turnpike — an aging complex where weather, labor issues and even computer problems have caused significant delays in recent years. But other factors embedded in the process itself are a concern as the ports prepare to begin accepting larger ships when work to raise New Jersey’s Bayonne Bridge is finished in two years.
Take, say, gadgets made in China. They would take about a month to reach the Port of New York and New Jersey. Once arrived, they can take nine days for the 20-foot cargo container carrying them to be unloaded, stacked, picked up by a truck, barge or train and taken to a warehouse for distribution to stores.
“Once we start getting those 14,000-container ships, and possibly larger, we’re going to have to do it differently,” said Molly Campbell, director of port commerce for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. “Because of the enormity of just trying to move out the goods, we have to find a different way to do it, and it’s more than simply saying, ‘I’m going to raise the bridge’ or ‘I’m going to bring in more rail’ or ‘bring in more trucks.’”
In 2014, the ports handled cargo valued at about $212 billion, according to the Port Authority. The Port of New York and New Jersey is the busiest on the East Coast and second-busiest in the country, behind Los Angeles/Long Beach, Cali.
The operation at the Port Newark Container Terminal, one of several terminals at the port, is breathtaking in its size and scope, starting with the 350-foot-high cranes that unload the ships.
Straddle carriers, essentially shorter cranes with wheels, then stack the containers for pickup by trucks. The straddle carriers weigh 75 tons each and require special pavement so they don’t sink.
The terminal epitomizes both the port’s transformation and the steps still untaken. It is tearing down two warehouses and moving its office building to create more space, and is installing technology to streamline the systems for loading and unloading of trucks. It’s even building two wider cranes in a lot nearby, a process that will take two years.
“You can’t just go down the street and buy one of those at the appliance store,” said Jim Pelliccio, president of the Port Newark Container Terminal.
For all the time and money invested — about $230 million in the past several years — $120 million more is needed to fix up an unused and dilapidated berth where an additional ship could dock and be near a railroad link, Pelliccio said.
The Port Authority also has sunk significant capital into improving the system, including the $1.3 billion Bayonne Bridge elevation in preparation for bigger ships plying a widened Panama Canal, more than $2 billion for harbor deepening and $600 million for rail improvements.