BY MARC CHASE, Times of Northwest Indiana
mchase@nwitimes.com
As business planners look to the freight industry as a replacement for the region's once-booming steel mills, they also realize that steel and metals have a major role to play in any cargo-based network here.
A study released last week by a Purdue University Calumet economics professor suggests that steel and metals -- though a shadow of the industries that once defined the Calumet Region -- still reign among the top types of freight cargo that pass through the area.
Dr. Amlan Mitra, the study's author, suggests that a better freight-logistics industry will not replace any existing industries in the region. It will only enhance them and attract new ones.
Of the various commodities shipped out of Northwest Indiana, base metal and machinery accounted for $11.9 million in goods being shipped from here in 2002.
Coal and petroleum products were a distant second, accounting for $6.9 million in shipped goods that same year, according to Mitra's study.
A Times' computer analysis of federal heavy-truck data in October supports some of Mitra's findings. Of the more than 5,000 heavy-truck companies operating out of the Calumet Region, 1,126 are listed as haulers of metals and/or steel coils.
And a look at the 2004 annual report generated by the Port of Indiana at Burns Harbor paints an even clearer picture. Shipping operations at the port handled 829,882 tons of steel either coming into the region or going out during that year. The second-largest category in terms of weight at the port was limestone at 534,233 tons.
But steel and other metals aren't the only opportunities for a thriving freight industry in the region.
Shipping operations at the port also handle large amounts of grain, feed, soybeans and other agricultural-related cargo. Included in that category is 25,575 tons of cottonseed, which is fed to dairy cows to increase milk production, the port's 2004 annual report shows.
Mitra said enhancing the freight shipping, warehousing and logistics industry here could help grow all existing industries -- and help attract new ones by offering closer, cheaper and more efficient cargo handling.
Among ideas for expanding freight logistics would be to build a new intermodal freight facility, in which large semitrailer-size containers of various cargo would be loaded and unloaded by special cranes between trucks and trains.
For this better freight logistics industry to take hold, however, region leaders need to begin realizing that jobs that would be created in the transportation, distribution and logistics -- or TDL -- industry would only be part of the payoff, Mitra said.
"The thing that really needs to be understood is that the real value in TDL is not necessarily in the jobs created by TDL in the TDL sector," Mitra said.
"The benefit is in what TDL can do to stimulate growth in other industries."