By Dan McCue

CHARLESTON -- Even at a distance of 1,194 miles, en route to Halifax, Nova Scotia, M. John Vickerman’s description of the potential of the former Macalloy site on Charleston Harbor was so vivid it was hard not to imagine him standing on the perimeter of the property and looking north toward Shipyard Creek.

But then neither the Port of Charleston nor the site itself are strangers to the world-renowned port development expert.

The consulting firm TranSystems Corp., of which Vickerman is a founding principal, currently serves as a general consultant on finance for the port, and his history in Charleston goes all the way back to the days when W. Don Welch was the port’s executive director.

“I even once served as an expert witness against the port in at the behest of the Daniel Island development,” Vickerman said, quickly ticking off his connections to the Lowcountry.

He was also involved in the creation of the base reuse plan after the closure of the former Charleston Naval Base was announced.

Last year, Vickerman became intimate with the Macalloy site when Lucy Duncan-Scheman asked him to do some port layouts for her CaroLinks intermodal project as a subcontractor for Davis & Floyd Engineering.

Today he’s working for Shipyard Creek Associates LLC, the new owners of the site, who are poised to try to make a go of the concept, albeit somewhat amended, that CaroLinks abandoned several months ago.

“My mandate from Shipyard Creek Associates was to come back and look at all the possible uses for the Macalloy site, unconstrained by what Lucy Duncan and CaroLinks had intended to do with it,” Vickerman said. “Our report was the basis of their meeting with their then-potential financial backers in Philadelphia.

“There’s no question in mind, given its high, dry acreage, deep-water access, potential linkages to both the Norfolk Southern and CSX railroads, and its proximity to the Port of Charleston terminals, that Macalloy is the perfect site for an intermodal facility,” he said.

To say such an assessment by Vickerman has weight in the port industry may well be an understatement. He has helped author strategic plans for more than 65 of the 90 deep-water ports in America, and his international work includes projects for the ports of Rotterdam and Hong Kong, and the intermodal freight analysis for Eurotunnel, more commonly known as the Chunnel, between England and France.

What all these projects have in common is that they were all based on the premise of helping ports and other freight logistics facilities anticipate the market and meet future demand.

“Like most of my clients, Shipyard Creek Associates basically wanted a scan of market alternatives to determine the highest and best maritime and intermodal uses of the site,” Vickerman said.

“Lucy was trying to move intermodal cargo by barge from the four major port facilities; Our analysis for Shipyard Creek has been a bit more mainstream,” he said. “For Robert Clement and his partners, we’ve looked primarily at intermodal support for the S.C. State Port Authority’s three-berth Navy base project. We also looked at the feasibility of bring in break bulk and roll-on, roll-off cargo.”

Vickerman, a current member of the Freight Roundtable Advisory Board to the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, has also served two terms as chairman for the Intermodal Freight Terminal Design and Operations Committee under the purview of the National Academy of Science’s Transportation Research Board.

His study for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, entitled “Trade and Transportation, A Study of North American Port and Intermodal Systems,” showed the entire network of North American container ports would likely exceed its capacity by 2013, and ports on all three American coasts would need to nearly triple their capacity by the year 2020 in order to deal with the exponential increase in cargo coming from India, China and other growing economies in the Far East.

“I believe the issues that we’re already experiencing with the China trade will grow, the West Coast of the United States will remain constrained and, as a result, an increasing amount of trade with be forced through the Suez Canal and to the East Coast,” he said. “That’s why taking every advantage of the opportunities presented to you is critical.”

The Halifax project on which he’s working for Melford International Terminal Inc., a private consortium is a Canadian response to those statistics and also an intermodal project conceived on a very grand scale.

In addition to striving to be among the first North American ports of call for mammoth steamships using the Suez Canal to transport cargo, the plan for the terminal on the wide and deep Strait of Canso calls for the facility to become a trans-shipment point where containers would be transferred to smaller ship or off-loaded onto trains for overland transport to points far inland.

Linkages is a word Vickerman used frequently when describing the project, and it’s a word he frequently applied to the Macalloy site as well.

“One advantage Shipyard Creek Associates has, by virtue of the location of existing tracks, is the potential of a partnership right off the bat with a Class 1 railroad that could move its cargo far inland,” he said. “Another critical factor in the site’s potential is the possibility of a linkage by bridge directly to the Navy base terminal.

“Theoretically, you could move high, wide and heavy cargo between the Navy base terminal and an intermodal facility at the Macalloy site without having to go off the terminal and into local streets,” Vickerman added.

Of course, one obvious question is how quickly the Macalloy site can be developed. If there’s a significant maritime component to the operation—ships dropping off break bulk cargo, for instance—the project would face the same regulatory environment as the SPA in regard to the Navy base terminal.

Vickerman said if the current, aged pier at the site is replaced and ships do call on the facility, Shipyard Creek itself would have to be improved in various ways to accommodate them.

“That’s another big difference between what’s being considered today and what Lucy proposed for CaroLinks,” he said. “Lucy had planned to have barges call on the site and the geometry of Shipyard Creek already complements that kind of usage.”

Despite the challenges design choices might bring, however, Vickerman still believes the site could be ready to go actively intermodal by the time the Navy base terminal is expected to open for business in 2012.

“In large part that’s because this is a private sector initiative,” he said. “They have access to capital, can reach out to shippers and retailers directly, and their access to market could be far more streamlined than in the case of a public project, which has to adhere to a different set of requirements,

“In the end I think what you’re going to see from Shipyard Creek Associates is an effort to achieve a synchronistic opening of the facility that would add value to the ports authority’s project,” Vickerman continued.

“Added value” is likely to be a mantra repeated often as the developers move forward.

“While there aren’t a great many standalone, domestic intermodal facilities to compare it to, having one dedicated to supporting the activities of the ports’ authority the way Shipyard Creek Associates has envisioned is fairly unusual,” Vickerman said. “And I think it could help the Port of Charleston effectively deal with one of the most persistent challenges confronting our ports: the dwell time of containers at their terminals.”

Vickerman said currently the average container entering the U.S. dwells at a marine terminal for six to eight days.  By comparison, the average container dwells only one to two days at an intermodal facility.

“So if, as a ports authority, you take advantage of that intermodal facility, you can decrease your dwell time, thereby adding capacity without building anything more,” he said.

“Another benefit of creating an intermodal facility, and one not often thought of, is that by virtue of getting trucks off the road and lowering diesel emissions, it’s a green enterprise,” Vickerman continued. “That’s particularly true in an area like Charleston, which is classified as a non-attainment air basin.

“In such an area, where emissions are highly regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, you can actually get a legal air credit for an intermodal facility and sell it to someone else operating a dirtier facility to help them achieve their emission targets,” he explained.