A Baltimore trucking business adapts to port closure: “We’re still here”

Inside an 80,000 square-foot warehouse in Baltimore, Maryland, a young man unloads boxes of canned albacore tuna from the back of a truck and stacks them on a pallet. When it’s full, the pallet will get wrapped in stretchy plastic and whisked away on a forklift to be stored among food from China, Europe and South America.

“We have lemon juice, we have banana chips, a lot of olives,” said Sue Monaghan, walking among the rows of stacked pallets.  

Monaghan founded Baltimore International Warehousing and Transportation in 1987. Today, she has four warehouses and 70 employees. Before the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed last month, most of this cargo would have come in on container ships through the Port of Baltimore, just 10 minutes away. Now, it’s arriving at the Port of Norfolk, Virginia, several hours to the south, or in New York, to the north.

“Other truckers are bringing it to the warehouse where normally we would take it in,” she said. “Our own trucks would pick it up, so we lose out on that revenue.”

After the bridge collapsed on March 26, Monaghan still had some containers to pick up at the Port of Baltimore, but with no more coming in, eventually she had to lay off most of her drivers. She left it to human resources manager Kristen Perrin to have those difficult conversations with employees, many of whom have been with the company for many years.

“A lot of them were understanding, like they expected it, they knew it would be coming,” Perrin said. “But it’s probably the worst part of my job.”

A few weeks later, the state approved the company for a worker retention grant, allowing Monaghan to bring back her drivers and pay them for at least eight hours a day.

“They don’t have to collect unemployment, which is not enough money for them to live on,” she said. “So we’ll be able to at least keep them employed, we think, until the cargo returns to Baltimore.”

In the meantime, the company has done the paperwork and permitting so its own drivers can pick up and deliver at the Ports of Norfolk and Philadelphia. Monaghan was able to call all of her 16 staff drivers back.

On a recent morning in the dispatch office, a large screen showed each driver’s location on a map. A week earlier, the map would have been mostly empty. Now several names, with their truck numbers, moved throughout the region, tracked by GPS.

“They don’t like to be tracked, but I love it,” Monaghan said with a laugh.

In the early afternoon, one of those drivers pulled into the yard. Laquwan Jefferson had just returned from delivering an empty container to Norfolk. He’s been driving with the company for eight years.

It was tough “when you get that phone call, saying, ‘sorry, we’re gonna have to let you go,’ and you’ve got children and then bills and everything to pay,” he said. “Luckily, they called me back.”

He’s still getting used to the long drive. He started his day at 3 a.m. and it took him four and half hours going down to Virginia.

“Coming back, depends on what time you leave,” he said. “Friday, it took me six and a half hours to get home. I like to drive but I don’t like to sit.”

Still he’d rather sit in traffic than at home not getting paid.

“There’s really no choice if you want to work,” Jefferson said.

He may not have to do that long drive much longer. The Army Corps of Engineers has estimated it will reopen the port’s main shipping channel by the end of May. That won’t immediately mean business as usual, Sue Monaghan said. 

“The vessels still won’t come to Baltimore, because the steamship lines are not booking cargo to Baltimore, until the channel opens,” she said. “So I think it’s going to be another month, month and a half before those ships come back to Baltimore.”

This has all been pretty instructive for Monaghan’s daughter, Shannon, who’s been training to take over the business someday.

“She’s getting quite an education,” said Monaghan. 

Asked if she still wants to run the business after what they’ve been through this month, Shannon Monaghan said yes. Then again, she started working at the company during another major disruption – the pandemic.  

“We’re still here, we’re still going,” she said. “All of our trucks are here now and moving, so that’s exciting news for us.”