Talking Supply Chain: Doomsday never arrives for Baltimore bridge collapse impacts

On March 26, when the massive cargo ship Dali lost power and crashed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key bridge, collapsing the structure, the news headlines portended a massive impact to the U.S. supply chain.

Now, more than three weeks’ out since that incident, the data is rolling in, and while truck traffic is being rerouted and the port of Baltimore has yet to reopen, the impact, at least from a rate and capacity standpoint, has been minimal.

“I’d already been tracking imports into Baltimore because March is the peak month for machinery imports—construction equipment, forklifts, backhoes, skid steers,” Dean Croke, principal analyst for DAT Freight & Analytics, told Talking Supply Chain host Brian Straight. “March is always the month where we see flatbed demand in the Baltimore market spike and it’s because it’s all around the port of Baltimore. My first thoughts were this probably couldn’t have happened at a worse time for [the supply chain].”

But what Croke said is that while there has been impact on flatbeds in the region, the dry van and refrigerated freight markets have seen much less impact.

“My first reaction was it’s not a top-10 port for containers, so we’ll probably see fairly minimal impact,” Croke said. “The carriers can still get out of the port and [get] northbound to 95 fairly easily, but southbound carriers will be affected, so my initial assumption was this is not a big deal nationally. But it will be a very big deal regionally, very specifically a lot of disruption for two categories.”

The two categories Croke referred to were specialized open deck trailers and flatbed.

Croke went on to talk about which markets are seeing an increase in traffic due to the rerouting of containers away from Baltimore, the impact this could have on capacity and a potential imbalance, and freight rates in the Baltimore region and related markets, and nationally.

Listen today.

SC
MR