by Dan Friedman

In our age of postmodernism and cyberspace it's sometimes easy to forget what Joseph Seymour, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, pointed out at a recent breakfast meeting with the New York Building Congress: "It is the port that made this city possible."

The increasing importance of airfreight over the last 50 years has been accompanied by the development of container shipping for marine cargo, which requires large tracks of land for container storage. One result of these changes has been the end of freight handling on the relatively small, crowded-together docks of Manhattan and Brooklyn. With the disappearance of shipping from the core of the metropolis, public awareness of the port has all but disappeared as well.

Shipping, however, has not vanished from the region; it has simply shifted to locations that have the acreage to accommodate containers - the ports of Elizabeth and Newark, N.J., and Howland Hooks on Staten Island.

Seymour said these ports provide 229,000 full-time jobs (to longshoremen, truck drivers, warehouse workers, custom brokers, railroad workers and others), an increase of 35 percent since 1985. New Jersey Governor James McGreevey, in a speech delivered at Port Elizabeth earlier this year, pointed out that the port is now generating $14.6 billion a year in economic activity for New Jersey and New York.
In 2002, container cargo volume in the region's ports grew by 13 percent, and according to U.S. Bureau of Census statistics, the port handled 588,815 ocean-borne automobiles in 2002, a 7.2 percent increase over 2001.

At the same time, the size of cargo ships is continuing to increase, which means the harbor needs to be deepened to accommodate them, and the area's ports are facing stiff competition from other Atlantic ports - Halifax, Boston, Baltimore and Norfolk.

Stronger Wharves, Larger Cranes

That's why the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is in the midst of a major capital program to expand and modernize the area's ports. The harbor, after all, is one of the main things that New York and New Jersey have in common and is at the heart of why the Port Authority was founded in 1921.

In 2002, the PA invested a record $134 million in improvements in port infrastructure and it is keeping up the pace this year, part of its ongoing $1 billion investment program designed to keep the region's ports competitive by increasing their capacity and productivity.

The PA's work on the shore is being coordinated with the Army Corps of Engineers' effort to deepen the major shipping channels in the harbor. The federal Water Resources Act of 2000 gave the Corps the mandate and the money to deepen the New York/New Jersey harbor to make it accessible to the new generation of larger, deeper-draft container ships.

By the end of 2005, Kill Van Kull, Newark Bay, Port Jersey and Arthur Kill will have all been deepened to 45 ft.; the second phase, which is scheduled for completion in 2010, will deepen the waterways to 50 ft.

"The Port Authority's work on infrastructure of the ports is being done to compliment the deepening of the channels to accommodate larger ships," said Rudy Israel, the PA's manager of port development. "The main work is strengthening the wharves. They were constructed in the late '60s and early '70s for smaller ships. Today we're going deeper with the piles to give them 50 ft. of water."

At the APM Terminal, leased from the PA by the Danish-based firm of Maersk Sealand in the Newark/Elizabeth complex, Weeks Marine Inc. has been working on the wharves since January 2002.

"In phase one, which was completed in December, we rebuilt 1,000 ft. of new wharf," said Rick MacDonald, vice president of construction at Weeks, which is based in Cranford, N.J. "APM continued working on the older section of the wharf while we did phase one. Now it's flip-flopped and they will work on the reconstructed docks while we finish the remaining 750 ft. by the end of the year."


Weeks' contract is with APM

The rebuilding, which will cost $30 million by the time it finishes, includes driving deeper piles, installing stronger beams to support the larger cranes that APM has brought in and redoing the electrification.

The old cranes ran along overhead rails. The new ones are on the surface connected to an electrical cable in a trench in the dock which spools it out as needed. Weeks will also be installing a cutoff wall at the end of the wharf to protect it from the dredging being done by the Army Corps of Engineers.

Granite Halmar Construction Co. Inc. of Mt. Vernon, N.Y. is doing similar work for the Howland Hooks port on the northwest shore of Staten Island. After a decade of inactivity, Howland Hooks was reopened by the PA, which now owns it, in 1996.

"We have a $35 million contract to extend the existing wharf 300 ft. to the south and 200 ft. to the north," said Christopher Larsen, Granite Halmar's regional manager. "The other major part of the job is rebuilding the existing wharf, which is 990 ft. long. We're putting new in new piles and pile caps. The rebuilding also includes strengthening the 20 ft. along the water's edge to accommodate the new crane rail."

This is Granite Halmar's first wharf job, but Larsen reports said his workers have taken to it like a duck to water. "It's heavy construction; that's what we do. It's a wharf instead of a bridge, but the principles are not that different." The work, which began last fall, will be completed by summer 2004.

Also currently working on wharf extension and strengthening for the PA are Spearin Preston & Burrows Inc. of New York City and Simpson & Brown of Cranford, N.J.

Of Tracks and Trucks

Extending and strengthening the region's commercial wharves is only part of the PA's plan to steer the port into the 21st Century.

Another major investment is going toward the extension and reconfiguration of the railroads that serve the ports. The most ambitious portion of this work is re-establishing a direct rail connection between Howland Hooks and rail lines in New Jersey. Currently, containers have to be loaded on trucks for passage across the Goethals or Bayonne bridges into Jersey and then loaded off the trucks and onto the rail lines that connect it to the rest of the nation.

Working with the New York City Economic Development Corp. and the Staten Island Railroad, which owns the long-abandoned tracks that run from Howland Hooks to New Jersey, the PA has committed $350 million to the restoration of the on-dock rail service, it's connection to New Jersey and the phased development of up to 177 new acres of container-handling capacity at the site.

Seymour said that negotiations with the city of Elizabeth, which sits on the Jersey side of Kill Van Kull, over restoration of the railroad took seven years to complete. Construction will be much shorter. It will start this year and be completed by the end of 2004.

At the Port Elizabeth/Port Newark complex, the rail lines are being expanded and reconfigured. "It will run between the Maher Terminal and the APM Terminal to move cargo between them," said Israel. "It will also hook up to the line coming in from Staten Island and to the national rail system."

The work will include depressing the rail line when it crosses McLester Street, the main route for trucks coming in and out of the port. Currently, trucks and trains are on grade, which means that every time a train passes, truck traffic comes to a halt. The rail work in Newark/Elizabeth Ports is being done by Conti Enterprises Inc. of Plainfield, N.J., and the roadway expansion and improvement in the port by JH Reid General Contractor, also of Plainfield.

With the exception of Howland Hooks, where the PA is doing all the developing, this work is being done in conjunction with the private companies that lease the ports, all of which signed 30-year leases in 2000. The terminal companies are paying for the upgrading of the wharves, the crane rails and new cranes. They are also upgrading the lots where the containers are stored. With more containers coming in, the pavement has to be strengthened to bear the increased weight.

The PA is paying for the road and rail improvements and is creating new container space by demolishing obsolete warehouses in the yards.

This upgrade of the infrastructure is bringing with it the reconfiguration and expansion of the ports. Port Newark Container Terminal is expanding from 160 to 175 acres. The APM Terminal in Elizabeth is growing from 266 acres to 350 acres.

The Maher Terminal in Elizabeth, which used to be two separate terminals, has been reconfigured into a more efficient space, gaining two useable acres in the process.

"More than 90 percent of U.S. trade is carried by sea vessels, and 60 percent of the Atlantic shipping comes through our port," Seymour told the Building Congress breakfast. "That's why we're investing so heavily in it. All our projects depend on a partnership between the public and private sectors. We depend on you to get the job done."