Race on to attract shipping business

(New York Times): Port officials in Georgia are racing to dig six feet of mud from the bottom of the Savannah River by 2014. In the world of major waterway expansions, that is an impossibly tight timeline. Without the $625 million deepening project, a breed of huge ships loaded with foreign-made iPods, furniture and other goods that will soon be able to traverse a newly widened Panama Canal will head elsewhere. And with them would go potentially billions of dollars in business. Like Savannah, other East Coast ports from New York to Miami are scrambling like shoppers at a post-thanksgiving door-buster sale, trying to become the go-to port once the canal is widened.

“Everyone’s lined up, and the door is about to open,” said Bob Pertierra, vice president of supply chaindevelopment for the Metro Atlanta Chamber.

But the battle is especially fierce in the South, where several ports are competing to become the region’s top destination for the superships. They hope to cash in on the biggest shift in the freight business since the 1950s, when oceangoing ships began carrying goods in uniform metal containers.

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