BY MARK B. SOLOMON, EXECUTIVE EDITOR – NEWS
MARITIME/PORTS
THE CHIEF EXECUTIVE AND PORT DIRECTOR OF
Port Everglades, Steven M. Cernak, would like Americans
to know they probably couldn’t start their day without his
port.
Most of the nation’s underwear traverses the Broward
County, Fla., port, according to Cernak, who has headed
up operations there since March 2012. Each day, enormous
quantities of materials enter the port to be loaded aboard
ships bound for manufacturing sites in Latin America.
The finished garments then return to the port, where they
are then loaded onto trucks and trains to complete their
journey.
“We like to think we play an important role in getting
Americans dressed each morning,” Cernak joked in a
phone interview.
Cernak’s jocularity belies the seriousness of his job and
gives no hint of the intensity that comes with spending
12 years as a senior engineer at the Port Authority of New
York & New Jersey, and then a 10-year stint as director of
the Port of Galveston before he moved to South Florida. In
a state surrounded by water, populated with 15 seaports,
and boasting the third-largest population (Florida recently
surpassed New York and trails only California and Texas),
Port Everglades sits at the top of several categories. It is
the state’s leading port by revenue (cruise and cargo), with
$153 million in fiscal year 2014, which ended Sept. 30,
2014. It is Florida’s top containerport by volume, handling
1.01 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) in FY
2014, an 8-percent increase over the prior fiscal year. It was
Florida’s leading export port, with $13.6 billion in exports
during calendar year 2014. It is the state’s largest refrigerat-
ed cargo port, and the seventh largest in the nation. And it
is the top U.S. gateway for trade with Latin America, with
15 percent of all U.S.-Latin commerce moving through its
terminals. In 2014, it handled a record $27.1 billion in total
trade, split evenly between imports and exports.
Port Everglades believes it has an ace in the hole with the
July 2014 opening of Florida East Coast Railway’s (FEC)
$72 million intermodal container transfer facility, built
on 43 acres adjacent to the seaport that the port provided
transportationreport
www.dcvelocity.com NOVEMBER 2015 DC VELOCITY 45
Everglades seeks its
place in the new
Florida sun
It is the top dog in a competitive statewide cargo market. But this Florida port
needs infrastructure improvements to be ready for the world of bigger ships.
