Story updated Nov. 5
While the Port of Grays Harbor isn’t experiencing the vessel backups and other issues impacting other ports, it is dealing with decreased vessel and train traffic due to a breakdown at Terminal 2.
The conveyor, or loader, at the AGP agricultural products terminal went down Sept. 1, “So it’s been two months without a soybean meal vessel,” said Port of Grays Harbor Executive Director Gary Nelson.
Nelson said about 80% of the Port’s revenue comes through its marine terminals, and AGP, primarily shipping soybean meal to Southeast Asia markets, “is probably 95% of that traffic.”
The breakdown of the loader, which takes product from AGP’s site and delivers it to export vessels, cuts deep into the Port’s bottom line.
“It’s probably in the magnitude of over a million dollars in lost revenue, and lost work opportunities for the longshoremen,” said Nelson. “It’s really hard to gauge how big that impact is,” he said, with the Port filing insurance claims for lost work opportunities, which will be a long and drawn out process.
Nelson tries to stay optimitic despite the troubles.
“The key thing is nobody was hurt, and remarkably other than to the loader itself there was minimal damage,” said Nelson. “There was no damage to the dock, and the vessel it landed on, there was a little bit of work they had to do, but not much.”
Nelson said AGP has always been very agreeable to work with and is working with the Port to get a temporary fix in place. On Tuesday, Port Deputy Executive Director Leonard Barnes was at Terminal 2 in the driving rain to help work with the temporary loader.
“Rognlin’s Inc. has been doing a lot of the work, and in the meantime we have an interim operation with two loaders that we hope will work,” said Nelson. “They don’t work as fast as the other system, but at least customers will be turning some wheels and loading some boats.”
It will likely take several more months of work to get the permanent loader going again; Nelson doesn’t expect the permanent fix until after the first of the year.
“We’re all anxious to get the loader back and going,” said Nelson. “It’s a critical piece of what we do.”
In the meantime, AGP has had to redirect its vessels and trains to other ports.
“They had product and they had to redirect their trains and their product to other places, and we had to redirect our vessels,” said Nelson. “They didn’t want to, and they certainly didn’t want them to, but there really wasn’t any choice, because you don’t want to lose customers.”
The Port has had a log vessel and a soybean vessel at port recently, and is expecting a total of eight this month, said Nelson.
Import versus export
Cargo container ships are stacking up outside of ports up and down the coast. The Port of Grays Harbor, almost exclusively an export facility, doesn’t have to deal with those issues.
Nelson talked about the potential causes of such backups at other ports, saying there is no one single explanation.
“A lot of the factories and manufacturing was shut down during COVID, so that stopped the production, so that’s just like a tsunami that’s going to come through” now that manufacturing has ramped up again, said Nelson.
“And then you lay on top of that the consumers that have been pent up and have disposable income they want to spend. So the demand is strong. It’s a bottleneck, I guess.”
He said the current situation is a good thing in that it makes consumers think about where their goods come from, and how they get here. And it’s not a permanent situation. It may create a “new normal” for imports, but is likely to calm down as production and demand evens out.
With the lower number of trains and vessels visiting the Port of Grays Harbor in recent months, Nelson said there’s been no shortage of advice coming from the general public on how to boost business at the Port. A common question is, why can’t some of those vessels stacked up for Seattle and other ports offload here?
“We’re not deep enough, we’re not wide enough” to accommodate those container ships, said Nelson. “And we’d looked at containers about 15-plus years ago — in the depth, the requirements of the channel, we just figured it was environmentally infeasible to do.”
Add to that the associated increased rail traffic, and the cost of the cranes required. “At that time it was about $25 million, I bet it’s $50 million a crane now.”
It’s a whole other operation as well.
“It’s not like logs or aluminum or steel, where you can just jump in and load a vessel or two,” said Nelson. “And the other thing is customs and border patrol. They’re short-handed — either because of COVID or they haven’t been able to recruit, or whatever reason, so they can’t process and nothing comes through until it’s screened.”
The Port has looked into the possibility of accommodating container vessels that have their own cranes, that could set the containers down onto Port property, but that would just be short-term storage until they can be offloaded somewhere else, and the Port of Grays Harbor doesn’t have a lot of equipment or manpower to provide that inbound service, said Nelson.
photo by Lee First A temporary conveyor system was put in place at the AGP terminal at the Port of Grays Harbor, with the hope that the system allows for the loading of ships for the first time in two months.
photo by Lee First The AGP conveyer at the Port of Grays Harbor’s Terminal 2 was damaged Sept. 1, 2021. Details are sketchy but nobody was injured. A temporary conveyor system is being installed to load ships as plans are made for repair.
