Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
With a Port of Lewiston announcement April 8, no more containers will be available for shipping by semi-trucks, rail or by barge down the Snake and Columbia rivers.
The development is a repercussion from the departure of two major steamship lines from the Port of Portland, due to ongoing issues with productivity in loading and unloading.
Hanjin announced in February that they would no longer dock at Portland, and Hapag-Lloyd followed on April 7. Thus, the supply of containers to be sent upriver to Lewiston has been nearly eliminated.
The giant Hanjin and Hapag-Lloyd container ships previously came to Portland on a route which included stops in Seattle, Tacoma and other ports along the West Coast.
“This has been a long-developing situation,” said Steve Johnson, a spokesperson for the Port of Portland. “We have done everything we can to keep them, including offering financial incentives. This relates to long-standing issues between labor and management. Slower productivity meant the carriers could not rely on keeping their schedules and still calling on Portland.”
Lewiston
“This thing is serious,” said Phil Hinrichs, president of fifth-generation Hinrichs Trading Company of Pullman. “We are now in a change mode.”
He estimates an increase of $1 to $1.50 per hundred pounds more to ship by truck to Seattle or Tacoma.
“This is with fuel at an all-time low,” he said. “I think it’s a five percent hit on the grower without studying it.”
In response to the situation, Hinrichs Trading Company has increased its “running inventory,” meaning loads shipped by truck which go to Moses Lake to a ZIP Trucklines container facility, where the cargo is taken from the regular trucks and loaded into containers. From there it’s driven to Tacoma and Seattle.
They are using their own trucks to haul to Moses Lake and hiring outside trucks as well.
BNP Lentil of Farmington is also running shipments through Moses Lake (although for the moment they are now getting containers back from Lewiston, loading them at their warehouse in Farmington and transferring the whole container in Moses Lake).
ZIP Trucklines is permitted to enter the Port of Seattle and Tacoma.
“We can definitely make our cargo sale through Seattle and Tacoma but the costs are higher,” said Hinrichs. “And those costs will definitely trickle down to the grower. Due to the fact that our end users (customers) ... it’s not their problem.”
Change
The coming change was evident two weeks ago when the Port of Lewiston began to release empty containers to be taken but not returned. Usually a container is tracked in a booking system, meaning that one would be released from Lewiston in return for another container to eventually be sent back.
“That’s when we kind of got the idea,” said Dan Bruce of BNP.
Now the containers, with about 80 remaining in Lewiston as of late last week, can be released to a truck driver with just a booking for a ship in Seattle or Tacoma.
“Everyone is trying to find the best way to get to Tacoma,” said Bruce. “Right now. Also Seattle. It’s going to take some time to get the logistics figured out. You’re doing whatever you can to keep things moving.”
Hapaag-Lloyd ships call on both ports.
For Bruce’s operation, aside from running containers through Moses Lake, they are also loading lentil shipments onto 53-foot “dry vans,” standard semi-trailers, and taking them to transloaders at Tacoma and Seattle.
At the transloader site the cargo is taken from the dry van and loaded into containers there.
“Thank God we were kind of slowing down in our shipping season,” said Bruce, noting that his busiest shipping times run from the end of August to around now.
“It’s a concern,” Bruce said. “But if you don’t have something you just have to find another way.”
Whether or not containers ever return to Lewiston depends largely on what happens at the Port of Portand.
The Port and its operator – ICTSI-Oregon – now seek another shipping line to serve the terminal with containers.
“We’re treating it (like) there’s not going to be containers in Lewiston from now on,” Bruce said.
Eventually, more may become available at Moses Lake from ZIP, by way of Seattle and Tacoma.
“One man’s failure is another man’s opportunity,” said Hinrichs.
Portland
Hapag-Lloyd accounted for 17 percent of containers arriving in Portland with one ship docking per week. Hanjin accounted for 78 percent, averaging 1,500 containers per week for both imports and exports.
With both now gone, Portland is served only by Westwood, a line that stops once per month on routes from Japan.
“For the most part, the port is closed,” said Johnson. “We hope that we will see continued service in the future. In order for a new container line to agree to come to Portland, they would need assurances from labor and management that they can be successful here.”
ICTSI-Oregon is a subsidiary of ICTSI, headquartered in the Phillippines, which operates container terminals in 20 countries around the world.
As for Lewiston, Hapag-Lloyd represented approximately 90 percent of the Port of Lewiston’s container volume. Container on barge volume is about 15 percent of cargo tonnage leaving the port.
The suspension of containers on barge service will not impact regional bulk grain shipments, which are at historic levels with approximately 22.9 million bushels exported in 2014.
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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