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Carolinks: The project
By Dan McCue
Staff Writer
Lucy Duncan-Scheman, Carolinks’ founder and CEO, stood in front of a white board in the conference room of her Broad Street headquarters and sketched out her vision of how an inland port could work.
In January, she unveiled plans to create an intermodal transportation network linking the Port of Charleston to an 800-acre, $250 million freight distribution site along the I-95 corridor, with a majority of the land set aside for privately-owned warehousing and distribution centers, and to a site in the Upstate that would service areas such as Atlanta, Birmingham, Ala., and Charlotte, N.C.
Duncan-Scheman’s scribbles took many shapes as she detailed her idea of moving freight from the Port of Charleston terminals to the inland ports.
The plan
In the short term, Carolinks will focus solely on transporting containers by barge from the South Carolina State Ports Authority’s Wando Welch terminal until the SPA builds its new container cargo terminal at the old Charleston Naval Base.
From the Wando Welch, Charleston’s largest terminal in terms of container volume and physical size, barges will carry cargo around the southern tip of Daniel Island and then deliver them to Carolinks’ 85-acre facility at Shipyard Creek in North Charleston.
Facilitating the transfer of containers to the barge at the Wando Welch will require the construction of a pier at the end of the existing terminal and the relocation of two cargo cranes the port currently has deployed elsewhere on the site, Duncan-Scheman said.
Barge industry professionals estimate that the one-way trip from the Wando Welch to Shipyard Creek will take about an hour under good weather conditions. They also said the depth change from 45 feet in the main navigational channel to 30 feet at Shipyard Creek should pose no problem because even fully loaded, the barges will have no more than a 15-foot draft.
But SPA spokesman Byron M. Miller said the port is not pursuing expansion of the Wando Welch terminal dock. “There’s simply no additional berthing capability that’s allowed at this time,” he said.
One problem, presumably, is that creating a pier at the Wando Welch terminal would violate the court-ordered settlement between the SPA and its residential neighbors that allowed the terminal to open in 1982. It would also be in direct conflict with the state and federal permits the SPA secured for the facility.
At Shipyard Creek, the company will create a new wharf layout intended to accommodate cargo hauled by two and perhaps as many as three barges at a time.
According to the Federal Maritime Administration, the cargo capacity of one barge is 15 times greater than the cargo capacity of one rail car and 60 times greater than the capacity of one semi-trailer.
Automated movement
After the SPA’s new terminal is operational, Carolinks plans to also pick up containers from that facility using automated guided vehicles—essentially a laser-guided cargo chassis.
The AGVs will enter and exit the port terminal via an access road that Carolinks has proposed to link the two properties. Currently, the two facility sites are separated by a small marsh the access road will have to cross.
“This is something we have proposed to the (SPA), but there’s still a long way to go on some of these details,” Duncan-Sheman said. “It’s an idea for a public/private partnership that I think will prove to be an icon for others to follow.”
Again, Miller took issue with the proposal. “Using AGVs between the proposed terminal and the Carolinks site is not part of the authority’s plans,” he said.
Carolinks estimates the cost of 15 AGVs will be about $8.8 million. The company put the cost of the laser-guided system, with sensors embedded in the access road surface, at $586,690.
At Carolinks’ wharf facility, the former site of the Macalloy Corp. defense plant, cargo containers will move in three directions.
After the containers are off-loaded from the barges onto AGVs, they’ll be shuttled over to the rail section of the yard and moved by a series of gantry cranes onto trains, which will transport the cargo to inland depots. Each of these trains will be 1,900 feet long, and each rail car will carry two cargo containers, one on top of the other, Duncan-Scheman said.
They’ll also be operational 24-hours a day, she said.
Several connectors to tracks operated by the CSX and Norfolk Southern railroads already surround the North Charleston project site. The cost of the cranes alone is estimated at $22.5 million.
When fully loaded, the trains will transport the containers approximately 55 miles to the proposed inland terminal adjacent to the I-95/I-26 interchange in Orangeburg County, or 214 miles to a facility at an undetermined site in the Spartansburg/
Greenville/Anderson area.
Barging cargo
But rail isn’t Carolinks’ only option for getting cargo to the Orangeburg site. Duncan-Scheman confirmed that the plan also calls for alternative barge access to the facility by traveling upriver from Shipyard Creek using the lock system operated by Santee Cooper and passing through both Lake Moultrie and Lake Marion.
Kenneth M. “Marty” Crosby, Carolinks’ vice president for operations, said barge transportation is one of the most energy-efficient forms of transportation and is “much faster than most people think.”
Duncan-Scheman conceded the trip would take about 24 hours.
“But again, our focus is on the customer,” she said. “Assuming that we are able to pick up within a day or two of the cargo being ready to be discharged from the port, time will likely not be an issue. For those customers wanting a faster delivery, we are prepared to use the rail service.”
Part of the plan also calls for using trucks for “limited boutique service” to local destinations using the proposed port access road that the SPA intends to link its planned $545 million terminal to I-26.
Completing the Shipyard Creek complex will be a container logistics center and a security-monitoring center.
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