Supply chains already feel the pinch as collapsed bridge blocks Baltimore’s port

Until the wee hours of Tuesday morning, the shattered Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore arced across the lanes where shipping traffic headed in and out of port. It was also part of a major interstate highway along the Northeast Corridor.

The Port of Baltimore isn’t huge. It’s the ninth-largest in the U.S. in terms of the value of imports it handles, according to the state of Maryland. But Tinglong Dai, a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said the port is pretty specialized.

“It’s the largest auto port in the United States,” he said.

Dai said vehicles come into the port from Europe and Latin America. Baltimore also takes in a lot of farm machinery and construction equipment.

Moving all that stuff off container ships and around the country requires a lot of unique shipping infrastructure, which Baltimore has.

“They just require different expertise, different size of vehicles,” Dai said.

Other East Coast ports, including Charleston, South Carolina; Norfolk, Virginia; and Savannah, Georgia, will have to figure out how to take in vehicle shipments that can’t unload in Baltimore, said Jason Miller, a professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University.

“Any time you have that important of a cog of the import supply chain essentially get jammed up, it’s going to be much harder to reroute that many vehicles through other ports, like Savannah, in the United States,” he said.

But Miller said those ports do have capacity for other types of imports, like consumer goods. That’s because import volumes have come down a lot from early in the pandemic, when ports around the country were overloaded.

“They would still have been handling more imports back in 2022 than they would today, absorbing those volumes,” he said.

In the meantime, a lot of importers are scrambling to adjust their supply chains.

“We’re all preparing for some sort of backup plan,” said Weston LaBar with the freight broker Cargomatic.

He said the pandemic taught a lot of importers how to be flexible. But adjusting supply chains will still be a challenge for industries in the greater Baltimore area that can’t just pick up and move.

“And the longer it goes on without resolution, the more stress it will put on the local community. Think the truckers, the warehousers, etc., who depend on freight coming in and out of the Port of Baltimore to be able to pay their bills,” LaBar said.

The Port of Baltimore said it doesn’t know how long vessel traffic will be suspended.