Parts of the Francis Scott Key Bridge remain after a container ship collided with one of the bridge’s supports in Baltimore, on March 26.The stunning collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge is diverting shipping and trucking around one of the busiest ports on America’s East Coast, creating delays and raising costs in the latest disruption to global supply chains.early Tuesday, ship traffic entering and leaving the Port of Baltimore was suspended indefinitely.
“Timewise, it’s going to hurt us a lot,’’ said Russell Brehm, the terminal manager in Baltimore for Lee Transport, which trucks hazardous materials such as petroleum products and chemicals. The loss of the bridge will double to two hours the time it takes Lee to get loads from its terminal in Baltimore’s Curtis Bay to the BJ’s gasoline station in the waterfront neighbourhood of Canton, he estimated.
“It’s a scramble because each of those containers has now a new journey to clear customs. You’ve got to get a different truck to pick it up at a different port. It creates a whole lot of downstream work,” he said. While shipments are pushed forward to get things out ahead of the holiday in early February, the period afterward “is the slow season for ocean freight,” he said.
The Port of Baltimore is one of the largest vehicle handling ports in the U.S., and a lengthy closing could disrupt the supply of new vehicles. In 2022, Baltimore ranked No. 1 with more than 750,000 vehicles going through the port, 70 per cent of them imports, according to the publication Automotive Logistics.