Port of Hope
D espite the current global recession, Lee Robinson Jr. is hopeful. Robinson's the president of both the OHC lumber and flooring company, headquartered in Mobile, Ala., in business since 1967, and the relatively new OHC Intermodal, an intermodal drayage and logistics outfit situated near the Port of Mobile. All the same, on an early-November flight through the south-east over the warehouse distribution sector of Atlanta, Robinson got a bird's-eye view of the recession one of the most horrifying sights I've ever seen, he says. Warehouse after warehouse had a large stockpile of trailers sitting idle. They were in big blocks, 10 or 15 wide by 10 or 15 deep, at the back of the lots. Robinson's horror is understandable OHC's primary business segment is supplying lumber for trailer flooring (his grandfather pioneered the use of wood on flatbed decks in the 1960s, he says). His ultimate hope, how-ever, is perhaps less obvious. His two-year-old, two-truck drayage fleet, OHC Intermodal, today mostly handling import/export containerized cargo for the lumber business out of the new Mobile Container Terminal at Choctaw Point on Mobile Bay, has experienced the same downturn, says OHC driver Dewayne Lamkin. When we're busy, we usually haul five or six containers a day out of there, logging plenty of overtime, he says. Such was the case when he started a little over a year ago, but today, we're about as slow as everybody else. All the same, the picture for intermodal hauling nationwide is bright going forward, experts agree, particularly if you're in the eastern United States. As capacity constraints and fear of labor disruptions continue to plague high-volume West Coast ports and with past hurricane disruptions to bulk shipping and rail into the highest-volume break-bulk port at New Orleans high in shippers' minds, smaller shipments of containerized cargo from Asia to East and Gulf Coast ports and then to truck have and will gain further in relative demand. California has continued to have their challenges with labor and with FEBRUARY 2009 TRUCKERS NEWS 19 TODD DILLS