Essay by Maggie Maize
The sun was just over the Savannah River’s murky water, spiraling in loose circles outside the ferry’s window. Wet and barnacled concrete columns along River Street exposed a recent tidal change of two feet. The boat’s interior wood paneling and ceiling-fans held the charm of a late 1940s streetcar.
A young man in shorts and a polo untied the Susie King Taylor from the dock and gave the captain a thumbs up. The boat cut against the tide with ease but rocked side to side as if she had stiff hips. It took two minutes to cross to Hutchinson Island and another to dock.
With the channel so empty, it was hard to imagine a container ship carrying 5,000 TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent unit) passing through it. Newer ships can carry up to 13,000 TEUs. And, as I learned on the Savannah Riverboat Cruise in November, not all ships can or will fit.
The Savannah port is almost two miles long, can hold nine to eleven ships, and is currently the second busiest exporting port in the United States. But are all the progress of dredging the canal deeper, employing 350,000+ people directly and indirectly across the state, expanding the Garden City Terminal, and plans for another port endangered amid the China/U.S. tariff conflict?
Sometimes, when the closest we in Savannah feel to the shipping industry is a blaring horn, people take river tours to understand the history, the mystery and complexity of its dynamics. It’s something I’ve done twice now, but there are more tangible elements to the system than politics and its economic effects.
Behind the painted and chipped faces of standardized containers and faded ship walls are bananas, printers, spray bottles, car parts, cars, socks, orange juice, iPhones, sculptures, paper, dirt (yes, dirt), oil, sugar, t-shirts, hula-hoops, computers, cotton, shoelaces, shoes and furniture. In Shipping Container, Craig Martin observes how containers contributed to “a system of global interconnectivity” after World War II.
The Savannah port tour through Outside Savannah left from the Westin Savannah Harbor Resort. This boat was off-white, the seats softer than the Susie King Taylor. The 33 hydra-sports’ movements were extensions of our tour guide and captain, Peter Pearson, who wore a seafoam UV-protection button down and light cargo pants. He covered his white hair with a gray ball cap.
“I got my captain’s license, ended up with a 500-ton license, which means I can run anything on this river but the freighters,” Pearson said. He put on rainbow reflective sunglasses. “I’ve been running the water-taxi at night across. I do the tours in the morning, and this afternoon I’ll spend the day in the wildlife refuge—you can’t beat that.” His southern accent seemed to hide, then peek through a word like an aftertaste.
Pearson also tests the river water. He majored in history and geography, studied ports and seaports and worked for an early intermodal carrier company.
Cargo shipping has come a long way, especially in the past 50+ years since the container. Before using containers, one hundred people would be “running back and forth, bringing it [goods] in, bringing it out,” Pearson said. “Today, four guys are unloading a ship, and they’re all using the cranes. That is the goody of containers.”
Yet there’s more to a port’s organization than the containers themselves. “The port of Savannah, if nothing else,” Pearson said, “may be the most efficient in North America because it is linear, controlled by one person, from one place, there’s no messing around and they thought about it before they built it. LA is still bigger, but if you go there, there are some here, some there, four towers here, eight towers there. The ship may need to dock at three different places.
Here, they dock it one place and the beehive of activity, open 24/7, 365, brings all the containers to that ship. No moving, no waste of time.” Construction machinery, caviar, coffee, video games, power transformers, suits, A/C units, carpet, aluminum foil, medical equipment, lamps.
“Everyone hauls in, everybody hauls out,” Pearson said. “When they pull in, the state of Georgia charges them anywhere from $50,000 to $200,000 to put a ship up to the dock, load it and unload it. So you don’t want to do it twice in one trip. Charleston, you’ll go to one dock, but Jacksonville, you might end up at three.”
Then Pearson accelerated through the muddy water. Wind filled the paused conversation. We slowed to pass a dredging rig; we returned to pace through what looked like a riptide but was a tugboat’s wake. It felt like the boat ran over treadmills aimed in different directions. These tugboats help ships navigate the channel, turn around and berth.
On a windy day, Pearson and his tour had to wait for the 28,000 hp of tugs pushing one side of the ship. The wind was so strong that it took them 45 minutes and a four-foot wall of water from the tugs before they berthed the ship. The number of tugboats needed is something to consider as ship sizes increase.
Accommodating larger ship sizes is a factor in keeping a port competitive. The more TEUs a ship can carry, the lower the costs. Naturally, larger ships also bring challenges.
The river tour I took last year on the Georgia Queen passed under the Talmage bridge connecting Georgia and South Carolina but turned around before the Garden City Terminal began. The tour guide, John Allen, said the original Talmadge bridge, “only had a clearance of 135 feet, which was just fine for the ships at the time. But ships were getting bigger and bigger until yes, one of these ships in the 80s did strike the underside of the shorter bridge. They had a big decision to make: get out of the shipping business or build a bigger bridge.”
Ports, states and nations must answer and act to considerations such as these, lest competition swoops in. Even Panama faced an ultimatum before formally proposing its expansion project in 2007 for a 2015 completion.
PBS’s documentary, “Panama Canal: Post Panamax” showed how Panama reacted to another development in the industry: larger ships. They didn’t want to lose business and jeopardize their economy. Of course, what would shipping companies’ options be—go back to circumnavigating South America? Stay with smaller ships that would fit through the old locks? The international project involved removing an island, developing water conservation basins, acquiring the funds, executing the programs with multiple contracting companies at once, building the lock’s gates across the sea and working against a deadline.
Panama’s decision to build the new set of locks—scaled up fifty percent—impacted Savannah and other significant east coast ports striving to stay competitive. Post-Panamax container ships are up to 1,200 feet long and 160 feet wide, according to Allen. For comparison, ships before for the Panama Canal expansion were up to 950 by 106 feet. But length or width weren’t problems for Savannah’s port. It was the river’s depth and Talmadge Bridge’s 185-foot high tide clearance. Ships draft (the measurement from waterline to the ship’s lowest point) deeper than the channel was dug out.
“This river rises and falls about every six hours around nine feet up and down,” Allen said. “Some of these deep drafted vessels, I’ve seen it before, they only have a ten-minute window of opportunity sometimes. If they miss this very narrow time window, they may have to wait up to 12 hours for the next high tide to try it again.”
In September 2018, one of the post-Panamax giants came into port. “As it was coming up river,” Allen said, “we noticed that it had an air draft, in other words from the waterline to the very top of this ship—189 feet. A crewman up by the masthead was actually able to touch the underside of the bridge.” It’s a fine line between height and depth. Here, only the low tide allowed the ship to pass under.
“It sounds very likely in the future that we’re going to have to build a bigger bridge,” Allen said. “We are the westernmost deep-water port on the east coast. It saves shipping companies a lot of money. They don’t have as far to go.”
Similarly to the Panama Canal’s advancements, Savannah had nature to consider. To environmentalists’ dismay, the Savannah Harbor Expansion Project (SHEP) was approved and began in 2015.
In fact, one of Pearson’s friends was in charge of the Sierra Club, an environmental protection group that fought the dredging. “He doesn’t understand that the water there is cleaner than it was 200 years ago,” Pearson said. “The only pollutants in it other than the mud, which are kicked up naturally, are mercury and lead. But, they come from natural deposits above the fall line. There’s nothing we can do about it. They told the people all over Savannah and all over the southeast, ‘If you let them dig this river out to 47 feet, you’re going to pollute the aquifer.’” Pearson’s accent revealed itself more when he imitated the group.
“I test the waters,” Pearson said. “I test for wells, and I happen to know that the highest up the Floridan aquifer comes close to here is 175-180 feet. The river’s 47 feet. Most of the river was already 47 feet—all they wanted to do was take the humps out so the big ships can come up.” The U.S. Corps of Engineers command the dredging.
“You may not know it by the way I talk about the river, but I am a conservationist and a tree hugger,” Pearson said, looking toward the foliage on the South Carolina bank. “We’ve had an eagle and an osprey within minutes of each other. That gives you an idea that this place is clean. There was not an eagle or an osprey anywhere around here forty years ago.”
Another concern the environmentalist groups had: Short-nose Sturgeon’s habitat along the riverbed. The water would be so hot and Oxygen-lacking in August that the Sturgeon would die. The issue was at the forefront of the Environmental Impact Statement. “The Atlantic Short-nose Sturgeon are not here July, August, September, October,” Pearson said. “They’re here two months out of the year. They come in from the ocean to breed in April, May and the first part of June. And so, we built this plant.” We pulled up to the plant’s concrete mouth sitting in the river, and every few seconds it groaned like it was trying to start up but didn’t. The system oxygenates the river and keeps silt from settling back where they dredge.
“Quite frankly,” Pearson said, through a grimace, “the state of Georgia would probably happily kill everything in the river from here to the Atlantic Ocean for 350,000 well-paying jobs.”
All the way up the ranks, it comes down to money. No one wants to lose the 84.1 billion dollars in annual revenue from the Savannah port. The desire to stay relevant is a national concern. In March, the funding for Charleston and Savannah ports crossed the president’s desk. According to AP News, Trump requested a 2020 budget of 130 billion dollars for the SHEP to keep Savannah competitive.
“The true importance of this port is getting ready to be tested if Mr. Trump gets what he wants,” Pearson said. “He’s either going to get a deal with the Chinese, which would boost the jobs here or there’s going to be a tariff, which would drop jobs here. Because the point of those tariffs is to create jobs inside the United States, the immediate effect of those will be these guys would probably lose part of their jobs.”
Why then would President Trump, who just advocated funding, imperil so many resources, jobs and profitable economic investment by attempting to place tariffs on China? It sounds nice—make China pay! If only that’s how tariffs actually worked. People pay taxes, not the government. Prices of goods imported from China would increase. Medicine, hoses, tires, frilly underwear, drab underwear, screws, dice, cables, luggage, linens, CDs, hair products, beach towels, diapers, books, coal, sweaters, plastic flooring, chairs, bikes, bobby pins. We raised our prices; China raised theirs.
Trump’s tariffs seemed abrupt, but he made campaign promises and believes his approval ratings will rise. This is a gangrenous trade war. What about the jobs he promised during the campaign—not only at the ports but the farmers, customers, who would pay the higher price?
Already, China’s turning to other countries with lower prices for goods such as soybeans.
“As far as politics go,” Pearson said, “it could slow this port up 25-30%. We just became the second-largest container port in America. And we’ve added about 10% to it to new contracts this year.”
Magenta containers sat on an Evergreen ship, twenty TEUs long, like a scrambled Rubik’s Cube. Shore-to-ship crane operators focused on shuffling around containers that hung below. The position they sit in, pitched forward, puts pressure on their lungs. For health reasons, now crane operators work two hours, take two hours off, work two, break two.
“These ships are never empty,” Pearson said. “If he takes them off, clears a spot, he’s going to load it back up.” Pork, couch throws, refrigerators, wood, kitchen mixers, greeting cards, bandages, jewelry, fake flowers, metal, bathroom rugs, hangers, yarn, piñatas, mops, poultry, dishwashers, glasses, pens, Halloween costumes.
The Garden City Terminal 2028 expansion and SHEP aren’t the only investments affected by this volatile tariff situation. In 2007, talk of building another port ten miles downriver from Savannah began. Jasper Ocean Terminal, expected to open around 2035, would support larger ships, cutting miles off the channel. After years of jurisdiction fights, South Carolina and Georgia agreed to have both of their port authorities run the port.
The horns blaring from the river carry a different weight now. They’re reminders from ships originating around the world that the shipping industry is still a mystery. But isn’t that the price of staying competitive?
