As elections loom on land, a different battle is shaping up for control over Delaware River waters – one happening mostly behind the scenes as the ports in Philadelphia and Delaware wrangle over who’s allowed to compete for container ship traffic.
Shots were fired this week, as a federal judge vacated a couple key permits from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that had previously been a greenlight for the Port of Wilmington’s $635 million, public-private project to build a container terminal at Edgemoor near city limits – creating a new, multi-terminal entity called the Port of Delaware that could handle triple the number of container ships as the current port, and compete with Philadelphia for dominance in Delaware River shipping.
We detailed the ruling in an article published this week – the result of only one of the multiple legal and political challenges raised by the Philadelphia port and its operators since Delaware’s quasi-public Diamond State Port Corporation first moved to buy a strip of land near Wilmington to double the footprint of the state’s largest port.