The 1906 Dredging Law That May Be Holding Back The U.S. Economy
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 20 April 2022
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The long grounding of the cargo ship The Ever Forward has shone a spotlight on the limited dredging equipment that exists in the U.S. The most powerful equipment here has significantly less capacity than what exists in Europe, or in the Suez Canal. What's more, the U.S. can't use foreign equipment due to a law known as the Foreign Dredging Act of 1906, which requires that any dredging done in the country, be done with U.S. labor on U.S.-owned ships. And while this has come to the fore due to the Ever Forward, the significance could be far wider. On this episode of the podcast we speak with Howard Gutman and Andrew Durant, both of whom are working to overturn the law. They argue that the restrictions on dredging equipment have significant negative ramifications for the environment, port capacity, and therefore the economy overall.
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| 0:00.0 | Adlots is brought to you by Apollo. When it comes to building and financing stronger businesses, |
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| 0:30.4 | Hello and welcome to another episode of the Adlots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. |
| 0:58.7 | And I'm Joe Wyzenthold. Joe, do you remember when you said you were going to base your entire |
| 1:04.6 | identity on repealing the Foreign Dredge Act of 1906? Right. Yeah, I do. So I remember we did an |
| 1:12.0 | episode very recently about your cargo that still stuck on this ship outside Baltimore. |
| 1:19.4 | And one of the things that came up was that there is this law from 1906 that prevents |
| 1:24.8 | foreign dredging equipment from operating in the United States. The United States doesn't have |
| 1:29.7 | a whole lot of high power dredging equipment. And I found that really wild. And so I jokingly said, |
| 1:36.9 | hey, I was going to make that my whole identity. And only half jokingly said, now we have to do |
| 1:41.0 | an episode on the Foreign Dredging Act of 1906. I mean, I don't think any of those should be jokes |
| 1:45.9 | anymore. I mean, I'm into it. Let's start. And this is not a joke to you at all. No, I have absolutely. |
| 1:52.8 | So I have a personal interest in the health of the US Dredging industry. Let's put it that way |
| 1:59.0 | because all of my belongings are currently stuck on ever forward. This giant container ship that |
| 2:05.0 | ran into the mud bank in the Chesapeake Bay. It's still stuck there. There are dredgers at work. |
| 2:11.5 | They're going to unload all the containers and see if they can reflow it. But again, one of the |
| 2:15.7 | things that's emerged from this entire incident is I guess years, decades of under-investment in the |
| 2:22.4 | US Dredging industry so that we actually don't have a lot of Dredging capacity. And our previous |
| 2:28.0 | guest who was talking about the cell Mercogliano, again, he has a great YouTube channel if you're |
| 2:33.8 | interested in what's going on with the ever forward. But he was saying that the dredgers that are |
| 2:38.2 | on the scene of the ever forward right now can move about 60 cubic yards of mud in each, |
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