Port of New Orleans Approves New Cold Storage Warehouse

A $25 million dockside refrigerated terminal will be built at the Henry Clay Avenue Wharf at the Port of New Orleans, the port’s Board of Commissioners decided Thursday. The new terminal, to be operated by poultry exporter New Orleans Cold Storage, should be finished by August 2011.

NOCS operates a similar dockside refrigerated warehouse, capable of freezing more than 500 tons of food products daily, at the port’s Jourdan Road Terminal. Before Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in August 2005, deep-draft vessels could reach that terminal for direct loading via the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet.

Although hurricane damage to this warehouse was repaired, larger ships could no longer reach it after the storm because the Gulf Outlet was closed and they cannot fit through the locks between the Mississippi River and the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, the only other all-water route for reaching the warehouse. Since the storm, frozen poultry has had to be trucked to terminals on the river to be loaded to large deep-draft vessels.

Work on the new terminal will include demolishing an existing cargo shed on the wharf, repairing its substructure and designing and building the new refrigerated warehouse. The site at the Henry Clay Avenue Wharf is inside of the existing footprint of the Port of New Orleans and all trucks bringing cargo to the site will use the Clarence Henry Truckway, a dedicated port roadway.

Some $23.5 million in funding will be provided by the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery Program of the Louisiana Office of Community Development – Disaster Recovery Unit. The port has also requested $16.5 million in federal funds to improve access to the site, for office space at the terminal and for dredging.

“When it comes to economic development, actions speak louder than words,” said Mark Blanchard, President of New Orleans Cold Storage. “As we worked to rebuild our business over the last five years, we got lots of help from our government leaders.”

The new 140,000-square-foot warehouse will be able to store approximately 175,000 tons of product, primarily poultry, at temperatures between –15 and 40 degrees Fahrenheit and blast-freeze 600 tons of product in 20 hours or less.