PortMiami set a new record-breaking year in collaboration with its partners.
During the 12-month period ending Sept. 30, 2019, the port experienced a 3.4 percent gain in cargo with a total of 1,120,000 20-foot equivalent units (TEU) and a 22 percent increase in cruise passenger totals, surpassing its previous world record with an all-time high total of 6,824,000 passengers.
Those perishable pharmaceuticals, fresh holiday flowers and frozen Thanksgiving turkeys are getting some new places to roost.
In the next few years, more than 400,000 square feet of cold storage is coming to South Florida. That’s still far less than the 1.5 million total square-footage of industrial warehouse space in the pipeline, according to the CBRE Group.
At the edge of a PortMiami wharf where the Seaboard Ocean docked on a recent afternoon, boilers , PVC pipe, pickup trucks, earth-moving equipment and even modular buildings are staged and ready to be lifted aboard for a trip to the Eastern Caribbean.
A little further along the wharf, the Seaboard Atlantic, which is preparing for a seven-day rotation that will take it to Honduras and Guatemala, is waiting to load containers, chassis, boilers, and telephone poles.
After disappointing years from 2006 to 2014, things are looking up at PortMiami. In March, the port handled 97,577 TEUs of cargo — the second highest monthly total in the port’s history — and, so far, cargo traffic is up 5.8 percent over the same period in fiscal 2017. (A TEU is the equivalent of a standard 20-foot container.)
