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Issue 2 2021 - FBJNA
///GEORGIA PORTS
By John Jeter
Griff Lynch looks out his office window in Georgia Port Authority’s Garden City Terminal and sees … fog. Welcome to a February morning in Savannah, where
the ports’ executive director is also looking out at the future. As the fog liſts, the executive
director of GPA sees trucks. A lot of them, moving fluidly, he says, in and out of the terminal.
“Here we are at 8 o’clock in
the morning, and we’ve already got probably several thousand truck moves done already,” he says “By 6 tonight, we will have executed in the neighborhood of 13,000 truck moves.” While a pandemic rages
outside the gates, the authority is busy protecting its 1,350 employees who are just as busy making that volume possible. The eyes of Georgia are upon
them. On Feb. 16, just a few days aſter Lynch’s
interview
with FBJNA, Savannah’s ABC affiliate, WJCL-22, broadcast last year’s staggering numbers: The GPA moved 4.68 million TEUs in 2020. Total cargo last
year topped 38 million tons across the docks at Savannah, Brunswick and its massive Colonels Island automotive ro/ro facility, among other statewide locations. In November, the Savannah
port’s container volumes in October alone reached an all- time high of 464,095 TEUs, up 8.3% from the same month the previous year. The performance eclipsed the previous record, set in August, of 441,600 TEUs, a 9.5% jump. Though total GPA volumes
The Wallenius Wilhelmsen vessel, Tirranna, departs the Port of Brunswick’s Colonel’s Island Terminal. (GPA/Emily Goldman photo)
increased “just” 1.8% over 2019, that’s still growth, despite 2020’s last three brutal quarters fighting COVID-19. “Nobody foresaw this
happening, this dynamic and the growth that we’re in,” Lynch says. He attributes
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