A shipment of wind turbine blades from China is offloaded at Delaware’s Port of Wilmington, which is enjoying an uptick in project and military cargo activity.
Nearing maximum cargo capacity on its existing footprint, the Delaware State Port Corp.’s Port of Wilmington is moving ahead with plans for development via public-private partnership of a new marine terminal on a recently acquired site.
While additional container cranes and berth enhancements are seen as a short-term solution at the present 308-acre facility where the Cristina River meets the Delaware River, DSPC is anticipating a February close on $10 million acquisition of a 112-acre site about 3 miles farther up the Delaware River but still within 70 miles of Atlantic Ocean waters.
“The timing was right, and the location is superlative for development of a container terminal,” John Haroldson, whose multiple roles at DSPC include director of marketing, told the American Journal of Transportation.
Because, according to Haroldson, the state does not have sufficient money to develop the site, DSPC is looking to the private sector for an investor and/or operator to advance a terminal on as many as 87 acres of the soon-to-be-acquired site.
“We already have had people approaching us,” he said optimistically.
Haroldson noted that the site, known as Edgemoor, fronts on the Delaware River, where nearly completed deepening is bringing the channel to 45 feet, and it is adjacent to Interstate 495 (paralleling the primary U.S. East Coast north-south corridor of I-95) and an existing Norfolk Southern rail yard.
The Edgemoor property, which formerly was home to a Chemours/DuPont titanium dioxide manufacturing operation, is among those identified for potential future development in a Port of Wilmington strategic master plan completed last July by AECOM. That plan suggests a possible annual throughput of as many as 970,000 twenty-foot-equivalent container units through a two-berth terminal, for which the master plan estimates development costs totaling $490 million.
The Edgemoor site could potentially be ready in as few as three years, following clearance of permitting hurdles, according to Haroldson.
Meanwhile, DSPC is going forward with optimizing throughput on the current port property, including with addition of two new rail-mounted gantries, anticipated for April commissioning, to double the terminal’s contingent of such container cranes along Cristina River berths 1 through 5. A rehabilitation project on Berth 5 is nearing completion, while a $10 million federal Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery grant also is supporting similar renovation of venerable Berth 6, to begin by summer.
“We’re already kind of maxing out,” Haroldson said of the present terminal, which dates back to 1923.
Rocket booster cores, each weighing more than 13 tons and measuring 87 feet in length, are lifted off a vessel from Ukraine at the Port of Wilmington.
Long-regarded as the “top banana” of U.S. ports, the Port of Wilmington in calendar 2015 handled a record of nearly 6.9 million tons of cargo, with about 1.6 million of those tons being bananas. According to Haroldson, Wilmington trails only Antwerp among world ports in volume of banana activity. Dole and Chiquita have been bringing bananas into the Port of Wilmington from Central America for three decades, and each added calls in spring 2016, with Dole bringing in a second ship every week and Chiquita adding a ship every other week.
Also on the fruit front, the Port of Wilmington is now in its seventh consecutive annual season of receiving breakbulk imports from Chile of grapes, cherries, blueberries, apricots, peaches and nectarines. And the port is in the midst of import season for Moroccan citrus, primarily clementines, with fruit for U.S. consumers cold-treated aboard vessel.
Supporting the fresh fruit trade, the Port of Wilmington boasts an industry-leading 800,000 square feet of dockside temperature-controlled warehouse space plus substantial additional chilled facilities nearby.
With regular calls by services of Höegh Autoliners, Alliance Navigation LLC and Liberty Logistics LLC, the Port of Wilmington also enjoys strong roll-on/roll-off activity, including exports to the Middle East of Fiat Chrysler and General Motors vehicles.
“We’ve seen a bit of an uptick in military and project cargo as well, with quite a lot going to the Midwest,” Haroldson said.
The Port of Wilmington recently handled a large shipment of General Electric turbine blades headed to a Pennsylvania wind farm, and Wilmington also is the preferred port of entry for Orbital ATK imports from Ukraine of rocket booster cores, which travel unimpeded by any stoplights on specialized trailers en route to the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Virginia’s Wallops Island, as part of the Antares program for supplying the International Space Station.
“Yes, it is rocket science at the Port of Wilmington,” Haroldson quipped.
For more than a quarter of a century, Paul Scott Abbott has been writing and shooting images for the American Journal of Transportation, applying four decades of experience as an award-winning journalist.
A graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, with a master’s magna cum laude from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Abbott has served as president of chapters of the Propeller Club of the United States, Florida Public Relations Association and Society of Professional Journalists.
Abbott honed his skills on several daily newspapers, including The Cincinnati Enquirer, The Richmond (Va.) News Leader, Albuquerque Journal and (South Florida) Sun-Sentinel, and was editor and publisher of The County Line, a weekly newspaper he founded in suburban Richmond, Va.
A native Chicagoan, he is a member of American Mensa and an ever-optimistic fan of the Chicago Cubs.
