Georgia ports are due a surge of shipments meant for Baltimore

Most of 24% increase in freight traffic expected to arrive at Brunswick.

Georgia ports expect this month to get about 17,000 extra units because of the bridge disaster that has closed the Port of Baltimore.

That means a 24% jump in vehicles and huge pieces of machinery on wheels coming to Georgia in April, with the lion’s share arriving in the Port of Brunswick, Grifford Lynch, chief executive of the Georgia Ports Authority, told the AJC Friday.

“In the short term it’s not a problem for us,” Lynch said. “The bigger question is how long is this going to go on?”

The shipments Baltimore specializes in are known as “Ro-Ro,” short for roll on-roll off. And only a few ports on the East Coast are prepared to handle them: mainly, New York, New Jersey, Jacksonville and Brunswick.

Baltimore has been the No. 1 port for those shipments. The Port of Brunswick has been No. 2.

But on March 26, the 985-footlong cargo ship Dali lost power and crashed into a pylon supporting the Francis Scott Key Bridge. The bridge collapsed and eight workers — all immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras or El Salvador — were filling potholes on the bridge when it collapsed. Only two survived.

A temporary, alternate channel for vessels was established, but it has been restricted to ships involved in cleanup of the disaster. The Army Corps of Engineers hopes to open a limited-access channel for barge container ships and some vessels moving cars and farm equipment by the end of this month and to restore normal capacity to Baltimore’s port by May 31, the Associated Press reported.

Before the crash, up to $200 million in cargo typically moved each day through the Port of Baltimore, the AP said.

With the port outlet effectively shuttered, materials and vehicles must be moved out of Baltimore by rail and trucking, according to Richard Rushforth, supply chain expert and assistant professor in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems at Northern Arizona University. So far, there haven’t been signs of bottlenecks, Rushforth said.

“I certainly think that trucking is much more flexible for moving goods,” he said. “I think it’s too early to tell about rail.”

More than a week after the bridge collapse, the scramble to adjust illustrates the lessons learned during the supply chain snarls during the pandemic, Rushforth said. “There hasn’t been as big a disruption as there maybe would have been 10 years ago.”

President Joe Biden visited the site of the bridge collapse on Friday to receive updates from the U.S. Coast Guard and Army Corps of Engineers and meet with families of the victims.

The Federal Highway Administration has provided $60 million in emergency relief funds to begin paying for cleanup and rebuilding. Some experts say recovery will take at least $400 million and 18 months.

Shortly after the bridge collapse, Biden said that the federal government will pay for the entire reconstruction cost. Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Dan Meuser called that promise “outrageous,” but Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell compared the situation to recovery spending after a natural disaster.

In 2007, after a highway bridge in Minneapolis collapsed and killed 13 people, Congress approved spending on recovery.

Overall, Baltimore ranks 11th in shipping traffic for containers, well behind Savannah, but it has also handled a huge number of vehicles and heavy machinery on wheels, cargo that can roll on and roll off, handling more than 80,000 autos, light trucks and heavy machinery units each month.

The Port of Brunswick had been handling about 70,000 of those units, according to Lynch at the Georgia Ports Authority.

The burden cannot be spread evenly to all the ports on the East Coast, since only a few ports are prepared to handle that kind of shipments.

Currently, the shipments being diverted to Georgia represent about one-fifth of the vehicles and machinery that Baltimore typically handles, Lynch said.

The Georgia port is in the midst of a $262 million expansion in anticipation of continued growth.