Viewed through a narrow lens, Savannah is a popular tourist destination with a seemingly aesthetic profile, accentuated by its Revolutionary War history, historic Black churches and colorful Victorian homes surrounded by Spanish moss.
For big companies, the city’s primary attraction has been a grittier side that has fueled an economic transformation over the decades: Savannah is the No. 2 ocean cargo complex on the East Coast, home to thriving container terminals that handle millions of tons of freight each year.
That economic motor for the city and the region sputtered to a stop this week after thousands of dockworkers represented by the International Longshoremen’s Association, or I.L.A., went on strike from Maine to Texas.
Instead of a stream of trucks moving big boxes in and out of the port, a group of around 100 dockworkers stood outside the main gates on Tuesday, intermittently chanting, “No contract, no work,” with traffic reduced to vehicles that drove by honking in solidarity with the striking workers.
But after three days, the group representing port operators made a new pay offer, and the union suspended the walkout.
On Friday, the Port of Savannah was humming again.
Trucks started lining up in front of the gates of the Garden City Terminal before sunrise, and by midmorning, large container ships made their way down the Savannah River, in clear view of the city’s downtown.
“It really was a herculean effort to get open this morning,” Griff Lynch, the president and chief executive of the Georgia Ports Authority, said in an interview.
For Savannah, the return to work represented a dodged bullet. Had the stoppage dragged on, the economy that relies so heavily on the port would have been thrown off course.
Port cities like New York and Boston have diverse economies driven by sectors like finance and medicine. Savannah, a city of 150,000 and the nucleus of a metropolitan region of 400,000, depends more on the freight traffic passing through its container terminals. (To the south, a smaller port in Brunswick, Ga., handles wheeled cargo like tractors and automobiles.)
A wide range of businesses depend on Savannah’s port, not just locally but also statewide. More than half a million jobs across Georgia, including nearly 60,000 in the Savannah metropolitan area, were supported by the state’s ports in 2021, according to a study from the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia.
“It’s the engine,” Dave Manns, the senior vice president for customer success at PortCity, a third-party logistics provider, said of Savannah’s port. His company’s warehouses cover around four million square feet in the Southeast, and the largest is in the Savannah area.
A few distinct geographic factors and historical trends have made the city an attractive place for companies to send their products. It has one of the westernmost ports along the East Coast, making it easy for truckloads to reach far inland in just a day. It is cheaper to build on its land than in, say, New York City or Los Angeles.
Amazon announced in 2021 that it was building a fulfillment center in Savannah. In 2022, Hyundai announced it was building a plant to produce electric vehicles there, with plans to spend nearly $8 billion on that factory, one of the largest private investments in Georgia’s history.
Yet a logistics hub wasn’t predestined for Savannah. Until the 1990s, the city primarily focused on exports of paper and chemicals at its port, and it didn’t have the critical storage space that companies look for when deciding where to ship their products.
That changed with a push by the Georgia Ports Authority to invest in more warehouses and build on the area’s marshy land. The expansion of the Panama Canal in 2016 helped, enabling larger container ships to pass through, according to Jean-Paul Rodrigue, a professor in the department of maritime business administration at Texas A&M University at Galveston.
The local efforts have paid off. Throughout much of the 2000s, the Port of Savannah was the fastest-growing container terminal in the country, and in 2022, it handled around 5.9 million units of imports and exports, nearly twice the volume from a decade earlier. Georgia’s large poultry industry has helped bolster exports at the terminal, which has in turn increased the production of warehouses around Savannah.
But even as things started to return to normal on Friday, businesses in Savannah faced a challenging few days of work, and some worried about what another strike could bring.
TCW, a warehousing and distribution company whose largest operation center is in Savannah, typically handles around 130 containers a day, carrying manufacturing equipment like car and golf cart parts. But a day before the strike began, with many drivers dealing with the damage caused by Hurricane Helene, TCW could handle only about a quarter of its usual volume. It told customers that they wouldn’t be receiving further shipments.
Given TCW’s limited space — it can store around 400 truckloads in its yard at a time — there was only so much it could do to prepare, said Ben Banks, a vice president of operations for TCW. He and the company had been monitoring the potential for a strike by the I.L.A. for about a year.
When word came that the strike was over, Mr. Banks said he was “pumped.” He hoped that with the port open on the weekend, his company would be caught up on its backlog by late next week.
Onder Ansary, the general manager at Phoenix Transload Services, which unloads freight from trucks, had been more worried about what the strike would mean for the cost of his necessities, and about possible consumer hoarding of products in anticipation of shortages.
“I’m still worried,” Mr. Ansary said on Friday, noting that the strike was only suspended, and that there had still been no overall contract agreement. In the meantime, he said, it would take about a week for things to return to normal.
Yet even with the recent disruption, he remained optimistic about Savannah’s economy. Mr. Ansary, 45, pointed to the relative ease of finding work, particularly compared with the situation when he arrived more than 25 years ago. Even a few years ago, the road he worked as an unloader was made of dirt. Today, it has warehouses for companies like Target and Wayfair.
“I do see Savannah as eventually competing with Atlanta,” Mr. Ansary said.
Renewed momentum was on display on Friday at PortCity’s warehouse.
Typically, trucks that unload imports enter it from the side closest to the port, and trucks that transport those goods inland arrive from the other side. Once the port shut down, there were no trucks to be found. Forklifts and golf carts that normally zoomed around the one-million-square-foot building were not operating, as boxes of rigatoni and diced carrots stood untouched, stacked to within eight feet of the ceiling in some spots.
“Usually, it’s control the chaos,” Mr. Manns said.
Now the chaos is back. “I can see and hear the forklifts zipping by like a well-tuned orchestra,” he said on Friday.
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