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| UPDATED: Sat Jun 2, 2001 02:26 AM | ||||||
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Powerhouse on the bay Mike Pettapiece The Hamilton Spectator
And yet to most people, the harbour is mostly a mystery. Hamilton's brand has long been steel. But the harbour has been its treasure, the geographic key that opened up the city's history. "This harbour is very vital, not only to the city but also to the economy of Ontario," says port director Bob Edwards. At 12 million tonnes of cargo last year, Hamilton's port ranks No. 1 in tonnage of all ports on the Great Lakes. That includes Chicago, Thunder Bay, Detroit and Toronto. Rail and truck traffic may be more in the public eye. But reports of the death of seaway traffic, or of the harbour itself, have been greatly exaggerated, said Edwards. Port activity -- all of its direct industry, such as steelmaking, plus all the indirect spinoffs, such as retail shops that benefit from port wages or contractors who service the steel mills -- makes up almost one-third of Hamilton's local economy. That's an estimated $5.6 billion of an $18 billion total. "In terms of straight economic out-and-out raw power, this harbour is an astonishing piece," says Toronto economist Garry Stamm, who directed an economic-impact study for the new port authority. "The port is a light switch to the core metals industries of Ontario," said the president of Stamm Economic Research. Stamm, assisted by McMaster University economist Atif Kubursi, found that more than 100,000 jobs are tied to the harbour, many of them metals-industry jobs. That's the local and area picture. But the harbour has a provincial reach. The study estimates that 4 per cent of Ontario's gross domestic product -- the sum of all goods and services -- are in some way related to industrial and other activities linked to the port. The deal that ushered in the port authority ends a stormy relationship between the City of Hamilton and the former Hamilton Harbour Commissioners operation, formed in 1912. The deal in effect gives the city the western end of the harbour and leaves industrial-commercial development in the east to the port authority. What frustrates port director Edwards and his staff is just how much of the port story remains an untold tale to most of Hamilton. People are far more familiar with an airport than a port. They take a jet but never ride a freighter. So residents are ignorant of business at the water's edge. The value of the port is just "not intuitively obvious in Hamilton's case," says Edwards. One reason is that there are few places that people can go to watch port activities. Stamm is positively bullish about the port's value. "What you've got here is an integrated complex of a sort that doesn't exist anywhere else in North America." He's referring to the blend of leisure, recreation, marine and industrial activities all in one spot. For the port authority, the harbour is where it all comes together. Without that intersection, there would be no steel mills, no stevedores unloading cargo from around the world. In truth, steel still makes the harbour. About 80 per cent of ship traffic is tied to the two steel giants, Stelco Inc. and Dofasco Inc. They need coal and coke and iron ore pellets to feed their blast furnaces in the first stages of making steel. Both are far smaller today than they were two decades ago. Even so, well over 11,000 people work at the steelmakers. And there are all sorts of customer, contractor and supplier companies -- many close at hand -- that depend for their financial lifeblood on the steel business. But the harbour is more than heavy metal. The port authority also plays landlord to 100 or so tenants. Among them are two stevedoring firms that load and unload ships, a maker of aluminum light poles, a railcar repair firm and a processor of seeds into semirefined vegetable oil. Sand and sugar come in the vessels that enter port. So does machinery and jet fuel. Improbably, one cargo is base alcohol from the Caribbean that goes into making rum or gin or other products. The alcohol is processed in a Toronto distillery. But that city has no liquid-handling and storage facility comparable to Hamilton's. "We're totally dependent on the harbour," says Mike McCalmont, of United Storage Canada. The company brings in vegetable oils, molasses, lube oils and the base alcohol cargo from sunny islands. It all goes into 40 storage tanks -- a warehouse for liquids that go by truck to processing plants and factories, mainly in Toronto. The port authority "has been pretty good. I dealt with Toronto harbour for a long time (in a previous job)... They've been taken over by the politicians. I don't want to see Hamilton go the same way. "I don't want to see condominiums (in the eastern, industry end of port). I don't want to see a park. I mean, this is what we do. (We don't want) to scare industry away." All this means the port authority must plan its growth carefully. That might mean replacing old buildings with larger premises. It might mean new business such as the container traffic -- the large "boxes" transferred from ship to trucks -- now done in the port of Toronto. It might mean buying new acreage around the rim of Hamilton's port. It is only by boat that you can see all the port's industry in the east end. The trip is rich in imagery -- a jumble of mental snapshots seen from the water. The viewer sees metal-clad warehouses sitting next to waiting tugs. The giant steel mills rise up in stark profile in the east end. Across from the mills toward the QEW, quite improbably, is a small parkette, complete with trees and benches -- a surreal oasis in a desert of industry. And there are the piles -- of sand, of coal and iron ore, of slag (a byproduct of steelmaking) and of scrap. To many people, the harbour is the city. Or at least the water has shaped much of the city's industry and early life. But the harbour is more than a porthole into Hamilton, it is also its window on the world. Ships under foreign flag come into port almost daily -- almost 200 last year. They bring in equipment from Europe. They carry steel slabs from Japan or hot-rolled coils from Ukraine. Super-sized bags of sugar come in from Brazil. As they retreat, some ships may take out steel from an area finishing plant, bound for Italy, or soybeans grown by a Flamborough farmer, heading to markets in Europe or South America. Slag also goes out -- 348,000 tonnes of it last year, some of it used as aggregate in making pavement. Among the most unusual exports are the huge chunks of curved plate steel, made by a St. Catharines firm, that end up as giant spheres. The globes, assembled later in central and South America, are used to store butane and propane gas. "There is a need for clean-burning fuels in that part of the world," says general sales manager John Raposo, of TIW Steel Platework. "And the infrastructure -- the natural gas pipelines -- just isn't there." Assembled, a gas sphere-tank weighs almost 600,000 kilograms. And it's almost 25 metres across. Think of that globe of the world, just east of Woodward Avenue, near the Queen Elizabeth Way, and you've got the right size. Of the 12 million tonnes of cargo recorded last year, more than 1 million left port, some destined for other Canadian and U.S. ports, some of it going overseas. All this trade makes money for the port authority, $15 million in operating revenues last year. The port won't say how much it gets in leasing fees from the 1 million square feet leased to tenants on 10 piers. Port planner Jeff Brookfield says only that the rent is "a very significant part" of annual revenues. The city gets its cut too -- $4 million in tenant property taxes. "We're unique (in Canada) to the extent of having industrial development in the port itself ... on the lands we own," says Brookfield. "We're always looking for port-compatible sources of revenue." That's where the economic study will help. It's a sort of snapshot at one moment. The last one was done 10 years ago. Port director Edwards says the harbour will use the findings for marketing purposes and to plot future development strategies. He figures the results will be put together "into a bit of a glossy format" to send to potential cargo and ship customers, to industries that might be interested in locating here. You can contact Mike Pettapiece by e-mail at mpettapiece@hamiltonspectator.com or by telephone at 905-526-3283.
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