WASHINGTON: The port has handled 2 million tons of cargo, despite a harsh winter that left the Great Lakes frozen into the early weeks of the shipping season. Despite a late start due to ice, the Port of Green Bay has cleared a cargo figure it uses to mark a “good” year.
While cargo numbers for November were down about 24,500 tons from the same time last year, the year-to-date total crossed the 2 million mark, sitting at roughly 2.1 million tons.
“If we end up up for the year, we did it with about a month shorter shipping season because of the persistent ice conditions that existed last spring,” said Dean Haen, director of Brown County Port and Resource Recovery.
Increased exports of sand and petroleum products have offset decreases in the coal and cement coming into the port. Salt, liquid asphalt and limestone imports helped bolster 2014 figures.
More unusual cargo was expected to move through the port this week the delivery of a 200-ton natural gas boiler to the Georgia-Pacific’s Broadway Mill, located adjacent to the Fox River.
The boiler was made in Canada and shipped to Green Bay on the 436-foot cargo ship Palmerton. An online ship-tracking website indicated the ship could be in Green Bay today.
The St. Lawrence Seaway said Tuesday it’s also expects its cargo levels to finish ahead of 2013 thanks to increases in grain and steel shipments.
“Renewed construction activity and automotive manufacturing lifted steel shipments by 80 percent to 2.2 million metric tons this season with ports including Detroit, Toledo, Milwaukee and Cleveland all benefiting from the increase,” a monthly report stated.
The Great Lakes shipping season generally concludes in December, and Haen said matching last year’s cargo total isn’t out of the question, but it may be close.
“We’ve got ships moving and we’ve got a stretch of warm weather forecast so we should get to a normal closure time of Christmas,” he said.
