{"id":228223,"date":"2026-06-25T22:12:17","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T22:12:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/228223\/"},"modified":"2026-06-25T22:12:17","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T22:12:17","slug":"great-lakes-cargo-shipping-is-vital-to-u-s-supply-chains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/228223\/","title":{"rendered":"Great Lakes cargo shipping is vital to U.S. supply chains"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lake Erie on a perfect June day may not look perilous, but looks can be deceiving.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen it blows up on Lake Erie, it blows up quick,\u201d said Christine Seuffert, who led Ashtabula\u2019s 77th annual Blessing of the Fleet.<\/p>\n

Since the 1940s, Ashtabula residents in the very northeast corner of Ohio have gathered<\/a> where its namesake river flows into Lake Erie. After the lake thaws, and the freighters set sail, those residents throw a memorial wreath into the harbor for fallen sailors, and a retired priest from the local Catholic Church leads prayers of protection from the perils of the deep.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

The annual wreath is donated by a local florist. This year, Brad Fagnilli and his wife Maggie help their children Andrew and Susanna lay the wreath into the harbor in honor of sailors who have lost their lives at sea.<\/p>\n

Caleigh Wells\/Marketplace<\/p>\n

The lake\u2019s shallow water means storms make waves much faster and closer together than on the ocean. Federal seaway pilot Gunar Luhta sat quietly in the audience. He experienced the rough seas of Lake Erie on Christmas Eve 25 years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were taking waves over the top of the pilot house. We lost our lifeboat, lost everything except for our GPS, lost our radar, and was able to navigate into the harbor using an old paper chart,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Luhta said his job is only getting busier every year. Even in the age of planes, trains and automobiles, more than 2 billion tons<\/a> of the goods consumers and businesses buy move by ship. Coastal ports tend to steal the spotlight, because that\u2019s where the stuff bought on Amazon tends to come into the country. But the Great Lakes and inland waterways carry nearly 700 million tons of cargo every year<\/a>, according to the American Great Lakes Ports Association. <\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of steel and a lot of grain, those are the primary things, but there’s also project cargo, like windmill parts, mast sections, and blades for windmills and engines and all sorts of stuff,\u201d Luhta said.<\/p>\n

All of that travels on the Great Lakes because they\u2019re close to a lot of steel mills and grain-growing areas. The cargo includes the grain that\u2019ll feed the cow that\u2019ll end up on your Fourth of July burger, the steel that\u2019ll go into your next car and the salt mined beneath Lake Erie that\u2019ll make your roads safer next winter.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe most efficient way to ship a whole bunch of salt that you mine under the lake is to ship it on top of the lake versus putting it on a whole whole lot of trucks and trying to send it that way,\u201d said Jonathan Ernest, an economics professor at Case Western Reserve University.<\/p>\n

Ships cut down on fuel use, pollution, and road congestion \u2014 and they save money. So the demand for them on the Great Lakes isn\u2019t going anywhere. Which also means that Great Lakes residents will keep showing up to their respective harbors every year, and doing what they can to make sure those ships get where they\u2019re supposed to go.<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lake Erie on a perfect June day may not look perilous, but looks can be deceiving. \u201cWhen it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":228224,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[98859,136,138,137,262,260,293,10625,68583],"class_list":["post-228223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-erie","tag-cargo-shipping","tag-erie","tag-erie-headlines","tag-erie-news","tag-great-lakes","tag-lake-erie","tag-ohio","tag-ships","tag-supply-chain"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228223\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/228224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}