This enabled the Tampa Bay entrance channel to reopen at noon Saturday.
Port Tampa Bay reported Saturday it had resumed vessel operations and reopened the port’s shipping channels with vessel movements restricted to daylight hours.
“We want to express our sincere appreciation to those who helped our port prepare and recover from the impact of the storm,” the port said.
Commercial traffic was being lined up for return, with fuel tankers, cruise ships and vessels carrying perishables first in line, a Florida television station reported.
Credit: NYT
Credit: NYT
Port Tampa Bay is Florida’s largest port, with about 70 miles of channels, and ranks 12th in the U.S. by trade volume, Woolpert said. It is responsible for 7 billion gallons of fuel, or nearly half the fuel the state relies on daily.
“NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) appreciates the quick action of our contract partners to assist in these emergency response efforts,” Rear Adm. Ben Evans, director of NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey, said in a statement released by Woolpert. “These relationships and mechanisms allow NOAA to accelerate the resumption of maritime commerce in the Tampa Bay area.”
“When a storm of this magnitude impacts a commerce-rich environment like Tampa, there is a high likelihood that it will drag debris into the navigation channels, which are important economic lifelines to these regions,” said Dave Neff, Woolpert vice president and director of the company’s maritime market. “In addition to clearing the way for emergency supplies, this work provides a critical service to quickly reopen shipping and commerce that equates to millions of dollars for the local economy.”
In an interview Monday, Neff said the Woolpert team didn’t find any shoals or piles of debris in the bay created by the hurricane’s powerful winds. But there were still plenty of ships waiting on Woolpert and its partners in the effort to ensure that the bay was safe and passable for travel.
“We still had to check,” Neff said. “It’s a critical service that we have to do. ... We worked around the clock to make that happen.”
Headquartered near the Beavercreek-Kettering municipal border, Woolpert is an architecture, engineering, geospatial (AEG), and strategic consulting firm, with more than 2,500 employees nationwide, about 200 of them in the Dayton area.
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