Port of New Orleans Attempting to Put the Pieces Back Together

Five weeks after the first of two hurricanes annihilated a third of his harbor, New Orleans port director Gary LaGrange is trying to resurrect one of the nation’s busiest trade gateways with a skeletal crew forced to live on an old cargo ship.

This week, LaGrange left the King Kennedy, the vessel that has been his home since Hurricane Katrina swept ashore, to tell the Senate Finance Committee in Washington how the densest concentration of ports on any U.S. coastline had fared during the hurricane double-header: not very well.

Katrina and Rita tore through 21 Gulf Coast ports, which include some of the busiest in the world for agricultural and other so-called bulk products, LaGrange said, adding that getting the harbors back in good working order was a matter of national importance.

“Some of the facilities may need to be relocated, and it will take months if not years to fully recover,” testified LaGrange, who is also chairman of the American Assn. of Port Authorities. “In New Orleans, for example, we are only 20% operational.”

The hurricanes damaged or closed ports along a swath of land from southeastern Texas to Mobile, Ala., threatening widespread delays along a cargo logistics system that serves more than 28 states and half of the population of the U.S.

The storms dumped tons of silt and other debris inside carefully dredged shipping channels, limiting the size of the ships that can enter them safely. Storm surges and winds damaged wharves, terminals, cargo-moving equipment and warehouses. And inland, the storms ravaged roads, railroad tracks and bridges.

The immediate port infrastructure repairs are conservatively estimated at $2 billion to $4 billion. But the heavier, long-term costs of hurricanes Katrina and Rita on the national economy are still unfolding and will take months to assess. Experts say that diversions and delays in shipping cargo as diverse as agricultural products, rubber and steel could send prices soaring here at home and make American goods less competitive in foreign markets.

“There has been nothing like this before. There is clearly going to be a ripple effect throughout the entire supply-and-logistics chain,” said John Martin, president of Martin Associates, a maritime consulting firm in Lancaster, Pa. “If this region is not rebuilt quickly, the economic impact could be enormous.”

Some ports, such as Houston and Galveston, escaped most of the damage that had been feared, but were still operating at reduced capacity this week.

Others weren’t so fortunate.

Mississippi’s busiest port, Pascagoula, which moves about 31 million tons of cargo a year, was open for only limited amounts of daylight traffic as of Friday, port officials there said. To the west in Gulfport, only one of two piers had reopened. Storm-tossed containers were piled near one end of the port, filled with rotting cargo

Hardest hit was New Orleans, which normally handles 15 to 20 ships a day and goods valued at about $37 billion a year, LaGrange said in an interview. Just five vessels came to the port this week and only one the week before.

Almost half of the estimated costs of rebuilding the region’s port infrastructure involves New Orleans. The greatest share of that, LaGrange said, would be the replacement of a crumbling, 82-year-old lock that could prevent some of the hurricane storm surge.

The entire layout of the port might have to be reconsidered, LaGrange said, from matters as simple as placing emergency generators higher than the ground floor of buildings -- the machines became drenched and were useless -- to the question of whether to move large portions of the port’s decimated southern arm north to safer ground.

In the meantime, LaGrange has had to concern himself with matters that few port directors have to think about, such as persuading the federal government to pitch in to build modular housing so that the truck drivers the port is trying to lure back to work will have some place to sleep. What housing remains in the region has been occupied mostly by relief workers. LaGrange’s own New Orleans home has been without electricity since Katrina.

Inland, several of the six railroads that feed New Orleans’ massive appetite for bulk cargo are still maintaining embargoes allowing them to stop accepting freight if their capacity is about to be overwhelmed. LaGrange said that restoring the port to full capacity would take a huge commitment.

“It will take several months to get everything shaking and baking again,” he said. “If we have done it in a year, we will have done well.”