Puget Sound ports need to get ready for Panama Canal widening

On Aug. 27, 2009, the containership Zim Djibouti docked at the Port of Seattle's Terminal 18. The ship was a fifth of a mile long. With a capacity for 10,060 containers, it was the largest containership ever to dock here.

Big ships come to Puget Sound, but not mostly for us. They come because we make it convenient for them to serve the U.S. interior. Their market is Chicago. The Windy City sits in a circle of territory that reaches to the Ohio River. Inside that circle is where Puget Sound ports are competitive in the Asia trade.

Our success invites competition. Canada has built a container port at Prince Rupert, just south of the Alaska panhandle. Cosco, the container line that linked Seattle with China 31 years ago, now calls at Prince Rupert twice a week and sends its boxes on the Canadian National to the U.S. Midwest.

"Our circle is getting smaller," says Tay Yoshitani, the Port of Seattle's CEO.

In the past few years the Port of Savannah, Ga., has attracted Asian cargo through the Suez Canal. They would do it through the Panama Canal and save thousands of miles, but ships like the Zim Djibouti are too big. Panama's locks date to 1914, which makes them older than the locks at Ballard.

Panama is modernizing. In 2014 it is slated to open new locks — longer, wider and deeper. The Zim Djiboutis of the world will then be able to slide through the isthmus to the Gulf Coast and unload Asian boxes for that charmed circle around Chicago. Houston is already preparing for this with Texas-sized investments in warehouses and terminals.

For the West Coast ports, the Panama Canal "is clearly a potential threat," says Paul Bingham of the Washington, D.C., consultants IHS Global Insight. Much of the actual effect, he says, will depend on decisions under no one's control here — such things as the price of oil, and how much Panama charges to get through its locks. But some things can be done now.

Ports can get ready — and Bill Bryant, president of the Port of Seattle Commission, says Seattle and Tacoma have done that. Together they handled 3 million containers last year, but are set up to handle 8 million. The weak points now are the road and rail connections.

Here's the pitch: to accommodate trucks from the ports, the state needs to finish Highway 509 at Sea-Tac and Highway 167 at Tacoma. For more trains to move through Auburn and Yakima, those cities need overpasses. These are "projects of statewide significance," Bryant says, and the state should pay for them.

The railroads also need to invest. When container volume tops 5.5 million, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe will have to enlarge its Stampede Pass tunnel for double-stack cars. At that point, Yoshitani, the Port of Seattle's CEO, expects the BNSF to ask for the ports' help.

"We would probably need to put some money into it to make their investment pencil out," he says, "but to do it right, BNSF would have to put more into it than we would."

All big U.S. ports have problems of rail connections, says consultant Ron Brinson of Charleston, S.C., former CEO of the Port of New Orleans. The railroads are old; the BNSF's Stampede Pass tunnel was opened in 1888. Of course it needs work.

These matters are not crises. They are only problems. They do need to be addressed, if the seaports of Seattle and Tacoma are to continue to fund payrolls and profits here.

Bruce Ramsey's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is bramsey@seattletimes.com