Conrad Everhard has been a consultant to the maritime community for more years than he’d like to admit, and his invaluable advisories were rarely, if ever, disregarded. In earlier commentaries we recalled his attempt to alert authorities to wasted efforts and costly funding of past, present and proposed dredging programs. When he was asked to serve as Moderator at Port Industry Day in 2004, Mr. Everhard made it a point to question the wisdom of expensive dredging projects in order to accommodate foreign-built and foreign-owned megaships. He reminded the audience, sponsored by the Port of NY/NJ, that these giant vessels not only require additional trucks for delivery, increase traffic congestion and create higher levels of pollution, but he also protested to his listeners that public funding of these dredging projects amounted to a subsidy of those overseas shipping companies owning the vessels. In spite of the fact that both the hidden and the obvious costs to consumers keep increasing, however, no one in an official capacity seems to have paid any attention to him. Well, why should they? “Officials” aren’t paying these costs. These add-ons are passed through the supply chain to the very last link … that end user-consumer-taxpayer.

Nearly five years after Mr. Everhard issued his criticism on the East Coast, citizens in Humboldt Bay on the West Coast are having second thoughts regarding the Bay’s dredging project in 2000. The project was undertaken by the U.S. Army Corps of engineers to prepare the Bay for the much- anticipated deep-draft traffic. The entrance of Humboldt Bay was deepened to 48 feet and the shipping channel to 38 feet, but to no avail. Today, five years later, less traffic is being seen than was seen in the decades before the dredging project. The “Army Corps covered most” of the cost of the project, the citizens were told, and the Eureka Redevelopment Agency kicked in the rest. [The “Army Corps” gets its funding from you and me, remember.] No doubt this is one of the developing fiascos that Mr. Everhard had in the back of his mind at Port Industry Day in 2000.

More directly, though, he was aiming his criticism and admonition that day at the sponsors who had selected him as Moderator for their event. The authorities at the Port of NY/NJ had made no secret of their plans to lay out the red carpet for foreign-owned megaships, and Mr. Everhard was one of the few who could foresee the fallacies in this thinking. Mr. James Hartung, following his lead when speaking in behalf of the AAPA at a briefing on Capitol Hill in 2001, stated that concentrating truck and rail traffic at a few hub-ports, or king-ports, would worsen congestion and create extraordinary logistic challenges. Mr. Nolan Gimpel of Axiom Consulting has stated even more recently that megaships strain the capacity of inland infrastructure, terminal operators and rail and truck carriers, and Mr.Neil Davidson of Drewry Shipping Consultants just last year predicted that operational and commercial limitations would reduce the effectiveness of megaships.

They’re the ones who get the big bucks to do all the research and the prognosticating, but the officials who are supposed to be standing watch are dozing off. On May 3 rd , various maritime publications announced that the newly dredged 45-foot channels at the Port of NY/NJ are now officially opened. The project cost the taxpayers $ 360 million … and it was begun back in 2000 in spite of the advice offered to them at their Port Industry Day. [One Humboldt Bay wasn’t enough.]