Port-Expansion Plans
Hit a Stormy Setback

HOUSTON -- The Port of Houston Authority announced plans in 1998 to build a $1.2 billion cargo terminal on Galveston Bay, hoping to ease congestion at the busy terminal as trade grows. Today, the plans are stuck on the drawing board because of opposition from environmental groups and hundreds of nearby residents.

"If we can block it forever, that would be fine with me," says Chad Wilson, a 30-year-old marketing manager for an oil-drilling contractor, whose four-story townhouse overlooks the water near the proposed terminal site. He worries that wildlife now there in abundance would be driven away by glaring lights and containers being hauled noisily off and onto docking ships.

The global economy is hitting rough waters in U.S. ports. As port officials across the country try to expand their facilities to make room for more ships and cargo, well-organized resistance is mounting -- and some opponents have found ways to delay, change and even sink major port projects.

Much of the backlash stems from environmental concerns about the smoke-belching diesel engines of the ships -- most of which face no U.S. pollution-control regulations -- along with exhaust from the trucks and trains used to bring cargo to and from the ports. Others cite the despoiling of undeveloped land often found near ports, which would be subsumed in many of the expansion projects. Population growth is forcing residential development closer to ports in some cities, exacerbating the problem.

Some residents also raise concern that imports from China and other low-wage countries are damaging the U.S. economy. Port expansions "make it cheaper and easier for imports and kills American manufacturing jobs," says Natalie O'Neill, mayor of Taylor Lake Village, Texas, and an opponent of the Houston port expansion. Others complain their property values may be depressed by a larger port.

Charleston, S.C., residents successfully lobbied the state's legislature to block the second-largest port in container volume on the East Coast from building a new terminal that would have covered about 800 acres. Environmentalists are mobilizing against plans for a new port near Savannah, Ga., claiming that it would turn the Savannah River into "a strip mall for maritime interests," says Judy Jennings, a member of the Sierra Club's Georgia board.

In Los Angeles, the Natural Resources Defense Council teamed up with local residents to halt the opening of a $97 million terminal finished more than a year ago. The environmental group insists that the port install special cranes to preserve views of the harbor, and wants docked ships to connect to a utility-company cable to provide electricity to their crews. Today, most ships run their engines even while at port so they can power their generators. An agreement hasn't been reached.

"The equipment is all lined up like toy soldiers, and it is all just sitting there empty," says a frustrated Douglas Tilden, president and chief executive of Marine Terminals Corp., which has been hired to run the new terminal.

Maritime executives complain that a continued logjam could hurt the U.S. economy. "Unless we find a consensus on port expansion, we will choke off foreign trade in the next five years, if not sooner," Mr. Tilden says. In Houston, which has more foreign tonnage than any other U.S. port, officials already are turning away some shipments, particularly from Asia, because there isn't space to handle it. Instead, those deliveries typically arrive at ports on the West Coast and then reach Texas by train.

Ports are a crucial trade link between the U.S. and the rest of the world, with more than 95% of all cargo from outside North America arriving by ship. Even though container ports typically consist of docks, cranes and vast parking areas for cargo containers, the facilities received little scrutiny from environmental groups for decades, partly because ports lack smokestacks.

Now that has changed. "Ports today are one of the single largest contributors to air pollution in big coastal cities," says Gail Ruderman Feuer, a senior attorney in the NRDC's Southern California office. Though some heavily polluting U.S. factories have moved abroad, "we are getting the pollution back in the form of container traffic at U.S. ports," she adds.

Cargo ships burn the cheapest, dirtiest grade of diesel fuel. Cynthia Bergman, an Environmental Protection Agency spokeswoman, says the agency is limited in what it can do to control emissions from ocean-going ships because most are registered outside the U.S. An international agreement to reduce emissions from ships, supported by the Bush administration, is awaiting ratification in the Senate and by other nations.

At the port of New York and New Jersey, environmentalists were earlier concerned that toxic materials from periodic dredging of ship channels and berths were being dumped in the ocean. The controversy has subsided as the port turned to alternative methods to dispose of the materials.

Some expansion-minded ports are trying to win over their opponents by adopting or proposing their own "green" measures. Long Beach, Calif., the second-largest U.S. container port after Los Angeles, touts its "Healthy Harbor Long Beach" program, which would include limits on exhaust from freight-handling equipment. Houston has agreed to build a 20-foot-high berm, or earthen wall, around its proposed terminal to partially shield unhappy neighbors from noise and light.

Port officials in Houston insist that their controversial new terminal is needed to end complaints from shipping companies about cargo-handling delays caused by congestion at the existing facility, called Barbours Cut. A total of 6,301 ships docked in 2003 at Barbours Cut and other facilities in or near Houston, a 19% jump in the past decade.

"You can't count on Houston to work the ship in a timely fashion," says John Mullaney, a senior vice president of the U.S. agent for Mediterranean Shipping Co., a container-ship company based in Geneva. It typically takes 24 hours to empty and reload the company's cargo in Houston -- about eight hours longer than at other ports. Each delay costs the shipping company $5,000 to $10,000. Mr. Mullaney says the new terminal "should have been in service two years ago."

The battleground is an undeveloped 1,100-acre area along the Bayport Channel, a 1.5-mile-long shipping lane built by the Houston port in the 1960s and traveled by tankers serving chemical depots on the west end of the channel. The site of the proposed terminal, which would be called Bayport Container and Cruise Terminal, is five miles south of Houston's existing 250-acre container facility.

Along the eastern two-thirds of Bayport Channel near Houston is one of the last unspoiled land tracts on Galveston Bay. Besides coyotes, which local residents say they can hear yelping at night, the wooded, marshy area is home to pelicans, deer and wild hogs. The channel is a popular spot for waterskiers and fishermen, and residents wave at crewmen aboard passing tankers.

Nancy Edmonson, the mayor of Shoreacres, a city of about 1,500 residents that sits near the channel, says the current view of a natural landscape across the water would be replaced by a jarring hodgepodge of cranes, ships and towering light poles. "I think it would be the ruin of our community," she says.

Mr. Wilson, the Houston oil worker, says he bought his townhouse two years ago because of its views of the Bayport Channel and Galveston Bay. A 1997 graduate of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at King's Point, N.Y., Mr. Wilson sailed around the world on container ships while he was at the academy. But he doesn't want to live close to a container port because of the intense glare from overhead lights and the noise of containers hauled off and on the ships.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approved the new terminal in December. But then the Galveston Bay Conservation and Preservation Association, an environmental group, and a handful of local communities filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Houston, attacking the Army Corps' decision as flawed. The suit claims the Corps' decision didn't weigh the cumulative impact from two container terminals. Construction is on hold until a judge issues a ruling, expected by early May.

"They're throwing everything they can at us," says Tom Kornegay, executive director of the Port of Houston Authority.

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