Posted on 07/10/2014 5:25:44 AM PDT by bestintxas
Texas stands to take a bite out of California’s lucrative port business according to the Wall Street Journal.
The widening of the Panama Canal, due for completion in early 2016, will divert a significant portion of the lucrative container shipments that currently pass through the Port of Los Angeles and other West Coast ports. The canal’s widening will allow much larger container ships to transit the canal and deliver their goods to the Port of Houston and other ports along the Gulf and East Coasts.
The WSJ reports:
Because of cheaper per-unit shipping costs, as much as 25% of West-bound cargo from Asia could shift to the south and northeast, according to a report by brokerage firm JLL.
The Port of Houston is expanding its warehouse space in anticipation of the increased traffic along with Gulf and East Coast ports.
The cost of shipping through the Port of Los Angeles increased substantially several years ago when then Los Angeles Mayor Villaraigosa pushed through regulations requiring the replacement of 16,000 diesel trucks to accommodate stringent new low particulate matter diesel engine regulations.
Former Obama Chair of the Council of Environmental Quality, Nancy Sutley, led the effort to implement the new rules as the Mayor’s head of energy and the environment. The impact of the rules reverberates to this day as an issue in a truck driver strike at the LA Port.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Event one will be the extended Panama Canal opening...which ought to take at least fifty percent of the dock business on the west coast.
Event two will be the eventual Nicaragua Canal opening (probably 2025, I’m guessing), and that will cut more into the port business of California, Portland, and Seattle.
If you were a dock worker on the west coast....I’d pretty much start putting the house up for sale, and try to get the union to move me into Texas. Then I’d have to assume a forty-percent pay-cut somewhere down the line. It won’t be a happy environment, and tax revenue will be drastically affected within the next five years. California just doesn’t have much luck on jobs.
To go with the cost of living reduction moving from Los Angeles, California to Texas City, Texas.
Just passed through it last November on a cruise ship. Fascinating piece of engineering. The new dig is massive.
Interesting. I never really considered how much effect a single city's mayor could have on the national economy.
Just what California needs ... less available work for more available workers.
The Panama expansion has removed most of the need for a new canal so I'd be surprised if it is even built. As for Texas, I don't recall any talk about excess capacity at the port of Houston or other ports, so unless the shipping companies start now to expand facilities then goods will continue to go to California to avoid the bottleneck in Texas.
Heard complaints on the radio about LA dock workers staging a Slow Down. Took one guy 8 hours to load, (unpaid hours). There’s no wonder whose side Obama would take if a full on Strike were to occur.
That means that it will then head up either 69 or 35 highway and end up in Gardner Kansas which is developing into a huge trucking hub. Gardner is southwest KCMO metro area. Also a big rail hub. There is pretty much unlimited room to expand. This lucrative traffic will go through three very red states, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas and involve one state, Missouri, that is sometimes conservative, sometimes liberal. So rejoice freepers.
Yeah, it’s an engineering wonder of the world, no doubt. I highly recommend the book “Path Between the Seas” by David McCullough. We all read it between San Diego and Panama, and it added a lot to our understanding.
BFL
I had a passport, I arrived on a boat without a visa. Of course, I had to visit a few govt offices to arrange the boat transit. I don’t know what visa requirements there are if any.
Too bad we lost Howard AFB. In the past, we could take military “space available” flights there very easily. Panama is a great place to visit. Lots of expats and semi-expats are buying condos and property there. Most folks speak English, and they use the dollar as their currency.
The interesting thing about the new dig is that it’s really an old dig.
A substantial portion of the engineering and excavation was done in WWII, to allow the passage of the Midway class carriers and Montana class battleships, which were too wide for the original locks.
The work was abandoned when the steel for the locks (and the five projected Montanas) was diverted to higher priority projects. So the Panamanians (and ChiComs) had a big leg up in making the current effort happen.
The {Houston} Port Authority plans to undertake significant infrastructure improvements in the next few years to ensure that the Port of Houston can accommodate the advent of larger vessels and increased cargo resulting from the pending Panama Canal expansion in 2016, as well as the expected future demographic growth in the region.
http://www.portofhouston.com/business-development/capital-improvement-projects/
I can hear the $250,000/yr longshoremen at LA Harbor crying already.
Then Long Beach’s loss will be Houston’s gain.
Die, liberal leftieland, die.
At least the “big one” will help clear out your rapidly developing third world debris.
California needed to get kicked in the nuts for their whacko regulations.
Jimmy Carter deserves a kick or two for giving away the canal to start with. If we still owned it CA likely could have pressured to block widening it.
Good for TX, crush the commie unions!
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