Export volume at the Port of Oakland, CA hit a three-year high in October as the facility shipped the equivalent of 89,473 20-foot containers.
The total was the highest since October 2013 and the fourth-highest in the port’s history, according to a news release. Agricultural commodities account for 40 percent of the port’s total export volume so far this year. In 2015 agricultural commodities accounted for 38 percent of the total.
Those numbers come from Datamyne, a source of trade intelligence that uses U.S. Customs and Border Protection data, according to Mike Zampa, communications director for Port of Oakland. Exports of fruits and vegetables from California’s Central, Napa and Salinas valleys go through the port.
Year-to-date exports from the Port of Oakland are up 10 percent over 2015. Contributing factors to the increase include “a softer U.S. dollar and healthy agricultural harvests,” according to the release.
“Increased export volume is nothing new; we’ve reported gains in nine of the first 10 months of the year,” Port of Oakland maritime director John Driscoll said in the release, “but the amount of volume growth highlights just how strong this rally is.”
Port History
According Wikipiedia, originally, the estuary, 500 feet (150 m) wide, had a depth of two feet at mean low tide. In 1852, the year of Oakland‘s incorporation as a town by the California State Legislature, large shipping wharves were constructed along the Oakland Estuary, which was dredged to create a viable shipping channel. 22 years later, in 1874, the previously dredged shipping channel was deepened to make Oakland a deep water port.
In the late 19th century, the Southern Pacific was granted exclusive rights to the port, a decision the city soon came to regret. In January 1906, a small work party in the employ of the Western Pacific Railroad, which had just begun construction, hastily threw a crossing over the SP line to connect the WP mainline with trackage built on an area of landfill. This act, protested by the SP and later held up in court, broke the railroad’s grip on the port area. The courts ruled that all landfill since the date of the agreement did not belong to the SP. This ruling ended SP control and made the modern Port of Oakland possible.
(Port of Oakland photo by: Robert Campbell, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers)