Today's Headlines Today's HeadlinesWASHINGTON -- Hurricane Floyd roared up the Eastern seaboard Thursday, but the powerful storm had few lasting effects outside coastal areas because it missed key inland distribution hubs, according to the Journal of Commerce.
Though the storm missed major logistics hubs such as Atlanta, customers in affected areas were facing delays that were measured in days rather than hours due to evacuation of cities such as Savannah, Ga., and Jacksonville, Fla.
"As you walk up the coast, you are not talking about effects on big hubs and gateways," said Norman Black, a spokesman for United Parcel Service in Atlanta. "There was certainly some ripple effect at Jacksonville and Miami. While they are main hubs due to the size of the Florida market, you are still talking primarily about Florida packages. It's not like Chicago, where something could go almost anywhere in the country."
John Hyre, a spokesman for Roadway Express in Akron, Ohio, said, "We have had only minimal impact to our system."
Dick Simpson, a spokesman for Crowley American Transport in Jacksonville, said the two-day delays caused by Floyd are manageable, and were just short enough to avoid systemwide bottlenecks.
"A day or two-day delay does not have any significant factor on it, even with the reefer cargo. You have contingencies," Simpson said. "If it had been longer than a one-day or two-day delay, then we might have had some problems."
Some are less lucky
The limited inland impact was not much consolation for those who were hit directly by Floyd.
A Crowley competitor in the Puerto Rico services survived a Floyd scare. An oceangoing tug hauling a 700-foot container barge for Trailer Bridge Inc. of Jacksonville, Fla., sank Wednesday but not before cutting loose the barge.
The tug was operated by Tidewater Inc. of New Orleans, and the eight crewmembers were plucked from the seas 350 miles east of Jacksonville by helicopters dispatched from the nearby naval carrier USS Kennedy.
The rescue was remarkable because three of the eight crewmembers were in the water and another five on a life raft.
"We were very relieved, and very thankful," Richard Currence, executive vice president of Tidewater, said minutes after word of the rescue.
Kathy Burns, a spokeswoman for CSX Transportation in Jacksonville, said that railroad largely escaped Floyd unscathed. "We are anticipating little damage from the storm," she said. "There are some trees down over the track and a few minor washouts."
CSX halted service between Richmond, Va., and Savannah on Thursday, though officials said they hoped to resume normal operations on Friday on that mainline.
CSX was holding 73 trains in the Northeast and Midwest, but that represented less than 5% of its normal daily train departures.
Mainline operations on Norfolk Southern were halted Thursday east of Greensboro, N.C., and Crewe, Va., in the central part of that state. NS reported minor damage such as downed trees and power lines.
Further south, many carriers, including UPS, were resuming operations after delays of two days.
CSX was moving freight between the Midwest and Southeast on Thursday, but delays continued because of crews shortage and paperwork problems.
Crowley American Transport returned to a normal schedule Thursday. The Port of Jacksonville reopened Thursday morning, allowing Crowley to resume its Puerto Rico and South America services, where shippers await their freight on tight delivery cycles.
Freeport resumes activity
Further downstream in Floyd's wake, shipping activity was returning to normal at the Port of Freeport, Bahamas. The Freeport Container Port, a major transshipment facility used by carriers marrying up their east-west and north-south services, was expected to reopen Friday morning.
"There was only slight damage. We lost about 20 empty containers," a Freeport official said.
At one point, the eye of Hurricane Floyd was expected to hit Freeport directly. That prompted fears of catastrophe because the container port was still installing three new gantry cranes that it had received earlier this month. The equipment was not damaged, port officials said.
The Freeport Harbor Co., near the container port, also reopened on Thursday. The first vessel from Tropical Shipping Co., a major participant in the Bahamas and Caribbean trade, was expected in the harbor early Friday. Neither the container port nor harbor suffered any damage from high waters, in part because Floyd passed during low tide.
Preparation a plus
After preparing for the worst, officials at the Port of Charleston, S.C., said Thursday they too had escaped largely unharmed by Floyd.
"One thing we learned is we have a good plan in place and it never hurts to be prepared. We were ready for it, no matter what it brought," Byron Miller, a Charleston spokesman, said after an initial damage assessment Thursday morning.
No ships were being worked Thursday in Baltimore, where 17 vessels were in port. Cranes were tied down Thursday, said Sara Moriarty, a spokeswoman for the Maryland Port Administration. The last two container ships left their terminals late Wednesday.
Because the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay was closed, no more vessels could reach the port from the south. On the north end of the bay, the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal was open Thursday, but requests to transit through the waterway were being considered on a case-by-case basis.
Norfolk Southern facilities were shut in Norfolk and Alexandria, Va.,
on Thursday with no indication when they would reopen, but operations were
resumed by Thursday in Florida and on Thursday at Charleston, S.C., and
Brunswick and Savannah, Ga.
WASHINGTON -- The Surface Transportation Board rejected two efforts to halt the potential resumption of service on a long-unused rail line that stretches across Missouri from the Kansas City area to the St. Louis suburbs, the Journal of Commerce reported.
The STB decision earlier this week rejected two petitions from Raytown, Mo., and Lees Summit, Mo., that sought to block the sale of a 270-mile rail line that runs through their communities. Both communities are suburbs of Kansas City.
Union Pacific Railroad owns the line, which was last operated in 1980 by the now-defunct Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad.
UP, which inherited the line through its 1996 merger with Southern Pacific Rail Corp., sought to sell the property because the giant carrier already had two other operating routes across the state.
UP agreed to sell the line to Missouri Central Railroad of Omaha nearly three years ago.
The parties won STB approval in 1997 to allow the Missouri Central to run trains over the line.
The two communities tried to block the planned sale, claiming that the property effectively was abandoned because trains had not run there for so long.
The cities claimed that Missouri Central had to file a more elaborate petition to build a new rail line.
The STB rejected that argument in a 1998 ruling. The cities subsequently filed a petition for reconsideration that was rejected by the agency in this week's decision.
The STB also rejected a petition by Raytown and Lees Summit over the situation relating to the sale of the line. UP decided in February that it did not want to sell the property to Missouri Central, because it said the potential buyer missed several deadlines for making a down payment.
Missouri Central said UP was the one that breached the sale contract and sued after UP announced plans to sell the property to someone else.
The cities argued that the Missouri Central's right to use the line should be revoked because the sale was not closed.
The STB rejected that argument, saying the ongoing legal dispute between
UP and Missouri Central was not a reason to cancel the new carrier's right
to use the line in the future.
MOSCOW -- Russia's Ministry of Transport met this week to gauge shipper interest in increasing use of the Trans-Siberian rail route and Russia's western ports to move cargo that currently moves on all-sea routes.
For Russian transportation officials like Boris Grishin, host of Tuesday's meeting and head of the ministry's sea transportation department, the objective can be met -- if ports like St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad can speed up the transfer of cargo from the Trans-Siberian rail system to ships bound for North Sea ports, and lower the costs.
But Moscow freight forwarders say the Russian ports are at a geographic disadvantage. Kaliningrad, the only Russian port on the Baltic Sea, is separated from the rest of Russia by a rail line and a highway that cross Lithuania and Belarus.
St. Petersburg, on the Gulf of Finland, is blocked by ice for much of the winter.
The Russian ports lag behind their Baltic competitors in investment, equipment modernization and handling efficiency. Kaliningrad is proposing that foreign investors expand its container-handling capacity and there are even more ambitious investment plans in St. Petersburg.
Most of the transshipment cargo that currently moves from northern Asia across the Trans-Siberian system is headed for Finland or the landlocked countries of Central Asia, like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. "Cargo headed for western Europe won't easily be attracted to the Russian route," said a participant at the Transport Ministry's brainstorming session. "That is because the Russians aren't thinking through to the final cargo delivery point in central and western Europe."
Government and industry officials agreed in Moscow to analyze the rate structure for Asian shippers.
The largest share of the Trans-Siberian container freight market -- about 65% -- is held by Trans Siberian Express Service, a joint venture between Sea-Land Service Inc. and the Russian state railways. The latter will divest and privatize its stake this year.
In the first six months of this year, container volume for TSES was almost 18,000 TEUs. This compares with 46,000 TEUs in the same period of 1998, before the collapse of the ruble drastically reduced inward cargo movement to Russia.
A year ago, just 15% of this cargo volume was in transit between Asia
and Europe, and the bulk of that flowed from east to west. This year's figures
suggest there has been a relative pickup in transit cargo, which now comprises
22% of the total movement.
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