56 Business View - October 2015
very little maritime. But, for the most part, the maritime-
focused companies are handling steel, coal, grain, fertil-
izer, project cargoes, limestone, liquid bulk, a wide range
of industrial materials used in manufacturing, and a lot
of construction materials. All of our steel is used in the
automotive and appliance industries. Lately we’ve been
handling a lot of beer tanks for the craft brewing industry,
especially in Michigan and Illinois, and a lot of windmill
components for Northwest Indiana, Illinois, andOhio. And
we handle a lot of large equipment for fuel processing
and electronic generation for nuclear power plants, large
engines, and generators. So it’s a wide range of cargoes
that are heavily dependent on the manufacturing sector
in the Midwest. It’s rawmaterials for manufacturing com-
ing in, and then a lot of agricultural products going out.
“All of our ports are served by Class 1 railroad connec-
tions in some way. For example, Burns Harbor has 16
different intermodal connections. You have eight rail car-
riers that service the region and five Interstates that are
within close proximity to the Ports. You also have three
different maritime modes of transportation that most
ports don’t have – ocean traffic, lake traffic, and barge
traffic.”
George Nelson was present at the dedication of Burns
Harbor in 1970, almost 40 years after he envisioned a
public port on the shores of Lake Michigan. One wonders
if he could have imagined the phenomenal growth that
has taken place in the ensuing 40 years, much less in
the last few. Peacock elaborates: “We’ve seen a pretty
steady increase in economic activity and cargoes over
the last three or four years. In 2014 -2015, we broke
five major shipping records at our three Ports. We broke
three annual tonnage records, so the Ports of Indiana
set a new, all-time high in total cargoes shipped in 2014,
which was the first time we’ve ever handled more than
ten million tons of cargo as a system. We were at 10.4
million tons at all three Ports, which was a 26 percent
increase from the previous year, and more than 800,000
tons more than the previous record, set in 1994.”
LOGISTICS