Mod Mobilian |  Notes on Mobile Infrastructure

Notes on Mobile Infrastructure

Mobile Infrastucture 

Port of Mobile 

  • The Port of Mobile was the 10th largest in the United States in 2006, handling 59.8 million tons of cargo
    • It is the world’s largest forest products terminal and first in nation for wood pulp export.
    • The Port of Alabama is served by 12 shipping lines.
    • The most frequent commodities transferring through are coal, aluminum, iron, steel, lumber, wood pulp and chemicals.
    • In March 2006, the main containership loading crane was struck by a ship, destroying it, costing the docks $4-6 million to replace.
    • The main harbor is capable of a 45-ft. draft and has a 1,000-ft. turning basin located on the Mobile River at Three Mile Creek.
    • 72 percent of exports originating in the Birmingham area and 92 percent originating in Mobile went out through the Port of Mobile in 1999. But looking at containerized cargo, just 3.4 percent of the container units exported from Birmingham traveled via the Port of Mobile, while 17 percent of Mobile area containerized shipments took that route.
    • The Port of Mobile is in a virtual tie with the Port of Houston, second only to New Orleans, in handling shipping to Cuba. Lifting the trade embargo on Cuba could create 100,000 new jobs and $6 billion in increased exports for the United States, according to research by local economics professor Semoon Chang.
    • Mobile  River  width  may  cause  some  difficulty  for  berthing/turning  the  mega  cruise  ships  over  of  1,000  ft.  in  length,  thus  limiting  the  class  of  vessel  that  may  be  positioned  in  Mobile

Alabama State Docks

  • The Alabama State Docks are managed by the Alabama State Port Authority.
    • For the first two hundred years of its existence, the Port of Mobile did not have a central organization. A constitutional amendment was passed in 1922 and the State Docks Commission was established.
  • The Alabama Legislature authorized the building of the Alabama State Docks in 1923.
    • Until that time, the port was a mixture of private and city owned docks. Modernization was needed, and only the state had the necessary capital available to do the job.
  • The commission chose retired Alabama-native Major General William L. Sibert, recently retired from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers after completing the Pacific side of the Panama Canal, to build State Docks. In 1928, the official dedication of the State Docks was held.
    • Sibert took 548 acres of marsh with the original investment from the State of Alabama of $10 million. He built three huge piers on concrete piling, one of them strong enough to support 1,000 pounds per square foot. There were warehouse-flanked slips for berthing 22 ocean liners at a time. There was also a loading plant with a capacity of 600 tons an hour, a cold storage plant with room to ice 50 railroad cars simultaneously. Sibert transplanted three miles of mainline railroad track which were in his way, diverted a creek to make room for more ships.
  • The Alabama state docks saw record cargo volume in 2007, driven primarily by a 50 percent increase in container cargo and record coal shipments.  27 million tons of cargo, including 21 million tons of coal, passed through the port, up from 24.6 million tons in 2006.  
  • The Alabama State Docks is currently undergoing the largest expansion in its history by expanding its container processing and storage facility and increasing container storage at the docks by over 1,000%.

Alabama State Docks Facilities

  • The Choctaw Point Container Terminal is a $300 million ship, rail, truck and air transportation facility under construction that will create 1,700 permanent jobs.
    • Choctaw Point is a partnership between Alabama State Docks and Mobile Container Terminal LLC.
      • Mobile Container Terminal LLC is in turn owned by APM Terminals, an A.P Moller-Maersk Group subsidiary (80 percent), and Terminal Link, a division of CMA CGM (20 percent)
    • Phase I of the new terminal is on track to open in September 2008. Two $7.5 million container cranes arrived from China in March 2008.
    • Terminal officials have said that worldwide container volume is expected to double by 2017, causing carriers that traditionally use ports on the west and east coasts to turn to Gulf ports like Mobile, which may also be increased with the widening of the Panama Canal.
    • The 55-foot deep basin is planned on the Mobile River side of Choctaw Pass, and will require the destruction of the northwest corner of Little Sand Island. Alabama State Port Authority officials said the $23 million project is on hold for the time being, however, because the Port Authority does not have any money to pay for it. The project originally was approved as a federal construction project to be built and paid for by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, but funding for it was not included in the most recent federal budget. It will allow ships visiting the new container facility or the McDuffie Coal Terminal to turn around without traveling up the crowded upper harbor section of the Mobile River to the only existing turning basin, located near the Cochrane-Africatown USA Bridge. A new, much larger class of ships more than 900 feet long would be able to visit the Port of Mobile. The present turning basin is only large enough for ships up to 850 feet long. – PR 4/29/08
    • Zim Shipping Service, which connects the Far East to Mobile, and Atlantic Cargo Services, which serves northern Europe, are the only container haulers that regularly serve Mobile. That number should expand by five or six within a year of the opening of the new Mobile Container Terminal. Shipping through Mobile is currently about 10 percent more expensive than other available routes. The docks expects to move 77,000 or so containers through its current facility this year. That capacity will grow fivefold when the new terminal opens this fall. – PR 6/8/08
  • General cargo operations cover almost two miles of waterfront and include 27 berths. The newly paved 16-acre container yard is served by Docks operated, rail-mounted, 45-ton lift capacity Paceco crane.
  • The Mobile Middle Bay Port on 2000 acres at the entrance of Theodore Ship Channel, the old Navy Home Port, has been up for sale.  ExxonMobile withdrew an option to put a LNG terminal there. The Docks named the site Middle Bay Port when the state took control of it from the U.S. Navy in 1994.
  • Located on the turning basin of Theodore Ship Channel, the Marine Liquid Bulk Terminal was opened in 2000.
  • Coal and iron ore are the primary tonnage at the Bulk Material Handling Plant. Other bulk ores include coke, gypsum, and ilmenite. Ground storage capacity is nearly 1 million tons and covered storage space is available for more than 100,000 tons.
    • The Alabama State Port Authority will spend $4.5 million to expand its Bulk Material Handling Plant, allowing the Southern Company to transfer more coal from rail cars to barges. Southern Co. has agreed to a special fee on all the coal that the docks handles, with the money going to pay for the new railcar dump, in part because the state docks didn’t have enough money in its own capital budget this year to cover the cost. The project will add 3 million tons of transfer capacity to the bulk plant, which is at the northern end of the main docks property on the Mobile River’s west bank. The plant can currently move up to 5 million tons of material a year. Last year, it moved about 3 million. The docks can also load barges at the McDuffie Island coal terminal, but there is no spare capacity there. – PR 5/29/08
  • McDuffie Coal Terminal, on McDuffie Island, is the largest along the Gulf Coast, and the second largest in the United States with a through-put capacity of more than 20 million tons per year.
    • The Alabama State Port Authority approved more money for efforts to control the dust generated by McDuffie Coal Terminal, which has for years sparked complaints from downtown residents. McDuffie is about a mile from the Church Street East and Oakleigh neighborhoods. The state docks since 1999 has invested about $4 million in dust suppression at McDuffie and has budgeted $3 million in 2008. Authority tests have found the percentage of coal in the dust is less than 15 percent.  – PR 3/26/08
  • The Terminal Railway (TASD) provides switching services to industries located the Ports of Mobile and Chickasaw, the Brookley Complex, and the Port Authority’s wharves and terminals.  The Terminal Railway provides switching services to five Class 1 railroads at the Interchange Yard – Burlington Northern Santa Fe/Alabama & Gulf Coast Railroad, Canadian National, CSX, Kansas City Southern and the Norfolk Southern. The CG Railway Terminal is also served by the Terminal Railway.  The Terminal Railway operates eight locomotives on 75 miles of track and has a fleet of 246 50-foot boxcars.
  • The Port Authority is constructing a $115 million public Steel Terminal at Pinto Island that will load ThyssenKrupp’s semi-finished steel slabs onto barges to be shipped up the Mobile and Tombigbee rivers to the mill. It is expected to come online in late 2009.
  • The city of Mobile owns about 20 acres along the Mobile River stretching from the north side of the Arthur R. Outlaw Convention Center south to Eslava Street, which houses the convention center, Cooper Riverside Park, the Alabama Cruise Terminal, and the future National Maritime Museum of the Gulf of Mexico
  • Mobile’ Cruise Terminal was built in 2004 for $20 million by an affiliate of the Retirement Systems of Alabama – PR 10/3/07
    • The terminal was projected to lose money if the Holiday remained its only tenant, because of yearly debt payments of $1.72 million.
    • The terminal is free-standing entity, but the city must cover all losses. The city is also scheduled to make a $16 million balloon payment in 2017, at the end of the loan.
    • The city gets 60 percent of any profits, with RSA getting 40 percent. The city’s share of profits increases to 75 percent if a second ship is recruited.
    • In 2006, the terminal brought in $58,000 more than it spent, thanks to $850,000 in homeland security grants and Hurricane Katrina reimbursements.  
    • Civic leaders continue to look to Carnival Cruise Lines to substitute a larger ship for the Holiday, which began sailing from Mobile in 2004.  Mobile leaders expect Carnival to introduce a Fantasy-class ship, which holds about 2,050 passengers, sometime next year, after a new ship is added elsewhere. Mobile’s new ship would likely make seven-day cruises, instead of the Holiday’s four- and five-day cruises, St. Clair said. At two people per cabin, the Holiday is rated to hold 1,452, but routinely sails with more passengers.

Airports

  • The Mobile Airport Authority manages Brookley Field and the Mobile Regional Airport.  Its current director is Bay Haas. 

Brookley Field Industrial Complex / Mobile Downtown Airport

  • In 1929, the city bought the property, creating Bates Field, the original Mobile Municipal Airport. 
  • In 1938, the US Army Air Corp bought the airport property and built Brookley Field, employing 17,000 Mobilians during World War II.  
    • In 1940, the War Department named the base after Capt. Wendell H. Brookley, a test pilot who had died in a plane crash
  • The Air Force announced a phase-out of the base in 1964. The city of Mobile took control of the Brookley Airfield in 1969.
  • In 2004 the authority adopted an overall Brookley makeover plan, which calls for better infrastructure.
  • In 2007, EADS built an Engineering Center of Excellence at Brookley, and selected it for its site of production of the A330 aerial re-fueling tankers.
  • Much of the 7,800-foot 18-36 north-south runway would disappear under the planned aircraft plants for EADS/Northrop Grumman.
    • While the overall effects to airport traffic is expected to be minimal, the Coast Guard and other military users could have to make changes in their training operations. The Coast Guard Aviation Training Center at Mobile Regional Airport uses Brookley to practice emergency landings.
    • The strip was once closed, but was reopened about 10 years ago after the authority won money to rehabilitate it.
    • Brookley has about 89,000 takeoffs and landings per year. Brookley can handle 220,000 takeoffs and landings without serious delays. That would only fall to 211,000 with one runway. The FAA’s forecast calls for the number of operations at Brookley to rise to 100,000 over the long term. – PR 5/25/08
  • The Mobile Aviation Center, a two-year college arm, teaches aircraft maintanence and construction certification courses at Brookley
  • Brookley Schematic (PR)

Highways

  • 1957 I-10 is built.
  • The I-65 link across Mobile-Tensaw Delta was completed in 1982
  • I-165 opened in 1994. I-210 was planned as a bypass of Mobile, but it was never completed. Many problems, including community opposition and access to the Mobile waterfront, prevented the freeway from reaching its intended southern terminus at I-10; I-165 ends about 500 yards short of I-10. Since the road had no connection to I-10, the number 210 was no longer applicable to the freeway, so 165 was chosen instead. Its construction resulted in the demolition of many structures within downtown Prichard, including such landmarks as the main public library and fire station.
  • The Bankhead Tunnel crosses the Mobile River for U.S. Route 90 and U.S. Route 98. It is named for William Brockman Bankhead, an Alabama politician and Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (Democrat) from 1936 to 1940. The Tunnel was built at the ADDSCO Shipyards. It was constructed in sections, and floated into position, then sunk into place, joined underwater, and when completed in 1941 the water was pumped out. Only passenger cars and pickup trucks are allowed to travel through the tunnel Large trucks are routed over the Cochrane-AfricaTown Bridge to the north or the George Wallace Tunnel on Interstate 10. The eastern end of the Bankhead Tunnel has a large “flood door” that can be closed to prevent the waters from Mobile Bay from flooding it during hurricane storm surges. The tunnel was a location for a scene in director Steven Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind; Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) drives through it as he chases UFOs.
  • The George Wallace Tunnel is a tunnel along I-10 that crosses beneath the Mobile River. It (like the smaller Bankhead Tunnel just upriver from it) was constructed at the ADDSCO Shipyards. It and the I-10 Bayway were completed in 1973
  • The Cochrane-Africatown USA Bridge carries US 90 and Truck Route US 98 across the Mobile River. It is the only cable-stayed bridge in the state of Alabama. The bridge was damaged on August 29, 2005 when an oil platform, the PSS Chermul, broke free from drydock and was wedged under the bridge by Hurricane Katrina. It was named after John T. Cochrane, Sr.

Railroads

  • Five Class 1 railroads serve Mobile: Burlington Northern Santa Fe/Alabama & Gulf Coast Railroad, Canadian National, CSX, Kansas City Southern and the Norfolk Southern
    • CSX provides through service to Pascagoula, MS and has the largest operation in Mobile.
  • Hurricane Katrina in 2005 damaged the CSX rail lines used by the Sunset Limited, which ran from California to Florida. Those lines have since been repaired, but the Amtrak’s Sunset Limited route east of New Orleans has never been restored.

Waterways

  • The Tenn-Tom and Intracoastal Waterways access the Port of Mobile

Infrastructure Projects

  • The new U.S. 98 project, unveiled in 2002 and estimated to cost $75 million, is being done in three parts: – PR 11/29/06
    • The Montgomery-based firm W.S. Newell is doing the first stage, a $21 million project to clear the path and build necessary drainage and bridges from the Mississippi-Alabama state line to Glenwood Drive, located just east of Big Creek Lake.
    • The Alabama Department of Transportation will bid out the $34 million second phase of the project, to clear and pave the section of the road that will run east from Glenwood to Schillinger Road.
    • The final stage, priced at $17 million, is to pave the portion that’s being cleared now.
    • The project should be finished by 2009, in time to connect with an extension of Alabama 158 that is being extended and widened westward from Saraland. The two projects will combine to make an expressway from Mississippi that will go to Interstate 65 without going through Mobile.
    • The Alabama Department of Transportation’s said the new U.S. 98 will take at least 10,000 cars a day — off Moffett. A highway department transportation plan says the new U.S. 98 is expected to carry more than 27,000 cars a day by 2030.
    • The construction’s runoff has endangered the water quality in Big Creek Lake – see here.

I-10 Wallace Tunnel Bypass

  • I-10 Bridge Options Map
  • A bypass of I-10 around the Wallace Tunnel has been planned. – PR 12/31/06
  • In 2005, the highway department estimated that a new bridge would cost between $603 million and $660 million, depending on which route was chosen. Those figures also include the cost of widening the Bayway. Now the estimate is closer to $700 million
  • The three principle proposals include a bridge over the Mobile River through downtown Mobile
    • State docks officials and the Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce have asked the state Department of Transportation to eliminate the southernmost of the three proposed routes, which would affect operations at Atlantic Marine Holding Co. and Bender Shipbuilding, and hasten the process of making its final choice. – PR 6/25/08
    • State highway department officials will ask the federal government to consider a fourth option – the “northern route,” would run along Interstates 65 and 165, Bay Bridge Road in Prichard, the Cochrane-Africatown USA bridge and the Causeway. Bay Bridge Road and the Causeway would be improved to highway-grade thoroughfares, and I-65 would be widened to accommodate the extra traffic. The highway department eliminated the northern route from consideration more than two years ago, saying it wouldn’t divert enough traffic away from the tunnel. The northern route would cost $973 million.  – PR 11/16/07
    • The Federal Highway Administration still has to agree to allow the northern route to be included in the draft environmental impact statement for the project. The inclusion of the northern route will probably mean the impact statement will take another year or two to complete. After it’s finished, the highway department will hold several public hearings before deciding which route to choose. After a preferred route is selected, more studies must be done. And the state does not have funding for the project.
  • The increasingly organized debate over whether and where to build a bridge shows how interest groups are becoming entrenched ahead of the release of an environmental impact statement on the bridge by the Alabama Department of Transportation.
    • Local maritime interests and shipyards have organized a lobbying group called Keep Mobile Moving and have hired a traffic consultant to help push their fight against an Interstate 10 bridge over the Mobile River.
      • The new-bridge routes could cost shipyards anywhere from $40 million to $250 million a year in lost business, a highway department study released earlier this year indicated. Some of those routes could put shipyards out of business by placing pilings in the middle of their dry docks, while any route would have restricted taller ships and oil rigs from traveling under it, the report said.
    • The Transportation Coalition, led by business, real estate and construction interests, argues that a bridge is vital to economic growth, and that it’s important for the Mobile area to work with highway officials to increase the share of roadbuilding money being spent in southwest Alabama.

Public Transit



Advertise Here


  



  



  



  


 

  



  



  

  

  



Advertise Here