Data from supply chain visibility platform GoComet on shifts in East Coast shipping as a result of the closure of the Port of Baltimore shows Norfolk, Virginia, gained the most incoming ships on average since the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse at the end of March.
In data provided to FreightWaves, GoComet notes that the 15-day average for vessel calls per day stood at 35 to 39 in Baltimore for the six days leading up to the March 26 collapse. It stays at 38 on March 27, even though the shutdown of the port was immediate, and slides from there until it gets to zero on April 12. No ships were coming in during that interim, but as the data is a 15-day average, it would take a few days to get the average down to zero.
As Gautam Jain, CEO of GoComet, noted to FreightWaves, the company’s platform records a ship when it goes to anchorage. So a ship that got inside the part of the harbor delineated by the bridge just before it collapsed might need a few days to get to anchorage, when it would be recorded by GoComet as having made a port call in Baltimore.
That is backed up by the individual data by day that shows Baltimore receiving 36 ships on March 26, followed by 28, nine and four before dropping to zero.
According to GoComet, the 15-day average in Norfolk did not start to rise until April 15. Between March 26 and April 8, it stayed mostly between 123 and 125 port calls. It then dropped to a range of 113 to 116 through April 14 before starting to rise.
Other ports didn’t see a boost
The jump in port calls in Norfolk was from 120 on April 15 to a peak of 167 on April 28. It slid to 160 May 4 before dropping to 150 on May 6. That is the most recent data provided by GoComet.
What sticks out about the Norfolk data is that other ports that were potentially going to see a rise in traffic as a result of the closure in Baltimore did not.
The 15-day average in Charleston, South Carolina, on March 26 was 89. On May 6, it was 85 and got no higher than 89 in the interim between the Baltimore closure and the latest day for which data is available.
Savannah, Georgia, was projected to be a beneficiary of the Baltimore closure given its significant role as a site for auto imports, but that also did not occur when traffic is measured as a 15-day average.
On the day of the collapse, the 15-day average for Savannah was 116 vessels, according to GoComet. It rose as high as 125 vessels a few days later but fell back to the 116 level by late April. The most recent data, from May 6, was 119.
There had been speculation that Norfolk would benefit the most because it does have auto import capabilities to at least partially replace some of the lost import capacity at Baltimore, a major site for auto imports. Additionally, Baltimore-based drivers of auto carriers, who are not on the road overnight as much as some other linehaul carriers, could take advantage of the added hours of service permitted in a Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration waiver issued shortly after the collapse and recently extended.
The FMCSA waiver extended the 11-hour HOS limit by two hours for truck traffic impacted by the bridge collapse, and those two hours were seen as potentially adding enough time for a driver based in Baltimore to begin servicing Norfolk without needing to relocate temporarily.
The shift in traffic did have a noticeable impact on dwell time, according to the GoComet data, even for ports that did not see a steady increase in traffic as a result of diversions out of Baltimore.
Dwell time up
GoComet defines dwell time as being expressed in days (after being converted from hours). A spokeswoman for GoComet defined it as “a measure of time elapsed from the point a vessel is detected near anchorage to the point it berths and is marked as arrived at the port.”
For example, on March 26, average dwell time was three days in Charleston, two days in New York, 1.69 days in Norfolk and 4.83 days in Savannah, according to GoComet.
By April 14, that had shot up to 5.26 days in Charleston, 4.67 days in New York, 5.54 days in Norfolk and 6.35 days in Savannah.
Some of that congestion had eased by May 9, the most recent date for which GoComet has dwell time figures. On that day, it was 3.3 days in Charleston, 3.32 days in New York, 4.11 days in Norfolk and 3.6 days in Savannah. But dwell time had been less than that on other recent days; for example, it was 2.9 days in New York on May 3 and 3.6 days in Savannah on May 9.
The rise in dwell time can be affected by individual day-to-day swings at ports that get smoothed out in the 15-day average. For example, in New York, GoComet recorded 221 ships calling at the port on April 9 but just 117 on April 14.
Whatever shifts have occurred as a result of the bridge collapse may be on the cusp of a reversal as the port gets ready to open to more traffic.
A controlled detonation of a chunk of the bridge that is lying on the bow of the Dali, the container ship that struck the bridge, is scheduled for Monday at 5 p.m. It had been delayed from an earlier detonation.
As The Baltimore Sun reported in an article about the demolition, “removing the ship from the incident site is a major step toward reopening the 50-foot-deep shipping channel, which authorities have said will be open by the end of May. The clearing of the channel will bring an economic boost for the Port of Baltimore, which has seen limited activity since the bridge collapse.”
That limited activity has been for smaller ships, and GoComet has not recorded any new arrivals for larger ships since transit resumed in late April.
Charles Van der Steene, president of Maersk North America, told CNBC last week that once the routes into the port are open, “our network team would expect to make final decisions on the rerouting of vessels back to the Port of Baltimore in the next five to 10 days.”
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