Port authority

Karen St. Cyr connects visitors with a powerful part of B.R. history

It’s no secret that the early-19th-century European colonial powers liked planting their settlements along the Mississippi River, but they did not do so for the magnificent views. They chose the river because it was the best commercial artery on the continent.

The powerful waterway transported lumber and furs from Canada and tobacco, sugar and other crops from Louisiana via ships to France, Spain, England and other colonies.

The river remains a significant commercial artery to this day, and the Greater Baton Rouge Port Authority, located in Port Allen, provides companies river access and related amenities when they don’t have their own.

“We’re an intermodal hub” for commerce, Karen St. Cyr, a spokesperson for the port, explains to a group of teens and their leaders visiting the facility one summer morning.

The 19 students from Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church Foundation’s Summer Youth Enrichment, a career development program, have come to see what the port does and how it provides jobs and attracts industry to the area.

“Intermodal hub” is port-speak for a facility where ships, barges, trains and trucks all converge to offload or load goods, and where companies can store those goods while they are waiting. The 400-acre property is on the Mississippi, the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, the Interstate and a crisscrossing web of rail lines. Its specialized terminals store petroleum products, timber, pipes, grains, wood pellets, sugar, molasses and other commodities. Also onsite are ancillary services, including a flour mill, Community Coffee’s roaster and a bulk packaging facility.

Touring folks through the port is one of St. Cyr’s responsibilities, arranged for any group with a few clicks on the port’s website. She has welcomed everyone from elementary school children to Rotary clubs, but she concedes that port security has been vastly tightened since 9/11. Fishermen can no longer cast a line from the port’s levee, bikers can’t ride on the port’s roadways, and port visitors can only leave their touring bus at a single specified stop.

The tour that begins at the contemporary Maritime Security Operations building is nevertheless informative. From a third-floor balcony overlooking the river, the students watch a high-riding freighter steam downriver, a muscular tug chuff upriver behind a long tow, and several small tugboats nose in at the port’s dock.

St. Cyr explains that the port actually extends from the Sunshine Bridge to north of Southern University. After showing an informational video, she leads the group to the command center for Maritime Security. Its heart is a digital console with wall-mounted screens to cover emergency responses to problems on the river or other waterways. With no problems at hand, the National Guardsman on duty demonstrates the computer tracking system that can follow every vessel from the mouth of the Mississippi to the port. He clicks on one of the numerous data points, revealing detailed information about that ship.

The group returns to Shiloh’s white bus, which crawls along in the wake of a port security car past huge grain elevators (handling six million tons a year), a grid of cylindrical storage terminals carrying molasses and onto the cargo dock. At 50 feet high, it exceeds any possible level of flooding. Today its cranes seem idle.

“The port works when there’s something to do,” St. Cyr says. “But that’s any time of day—including night.”

The single stop is inside a dimly lit, cavernous corrugated metal warehouse that smells like a sugar mill—the sugar distribution facility.
“We can store 80,000 tons of sugar here,” St. Cyr tells her visitors as a gaggle of them leave the bus to approach a 20-foot-high dune of packed brown crystals. They track sugar like beach sand back onto the bus.

Beyond the sugar warehouse are two surreal white domes, inflated storage terminals that hold wood pellets, a substitute fuel for coal.
The tour of the sprawling industrial site ends without a survey of the students to discover if any of them, including the young man who wanted to be a funeral director and several would-be attorneys, have redefined their career plans.

Whether or not the Port of Greater Baton Rouge has picked up some future employees, the students leave with an appreciation for how commerce on the Mississippi evolved—and a big piece of why Baton Rouge was born.

ONLINE:
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