Savannah port congestion

Savannah is the Southeast's main container gateway, built around the Georgia Ports Authority's Garden City Terminal, the largest single-operator container terminal in North America. Where LA/Long Beach and NY/NJ sit on services that carry Asia cargo to the coast and then hand it off, Savannah is reached mainly by all-water service: ships load in Asia and sail the whole way through the Panama Canal rather than landing on the West Coast and moving east by rail. That routing has pulled volume toward Savannah over the past decade as importers diversify away from a single coast, and Garden City feeds inland markets as far as Atlanta, Charlotte and Memphis by rail and truck.

This hub page shows the import-friction read for the complex: a plain, rules-based label built from where its live metrics sit against their own trailing-12-month median. Savannah reports two of the three components this site tracks, the ship queue and loaded-import TEU. BTS does not publish a truck planning-time index for Savannah, so the composite here is judged on those two alone. A component reading more than 15% above its trailing-12-month median counts as elevated. The ship queue is a small count, so it also has to sit at least two ships above its median to count as elevated; a one-ship swing on a calm queue stays near normal. Zero elevated components reads Flowing, one reads Some pressure, two or more reads Congested. It describes the current numbers, never a forecast.

Ships awaiting berth (week of Oct 19, 2026) is 0 ships, below its trailing-12-month normal of 2 ships (the past year has ranged 0 ships–9 ships). Loaded imports (Jul 2026) is 251,888 TEU, near its trailing-12-month normal of 239,584 TEU (the past year has ranged 219,387 TEU–262,050 TEU).

Savannah's congestion pattern follows the same national import calendar as the other gateways: volume typically builds from midsummer into an August-to-October peak as retailers restock for the holidays, then eases into the new year. Savannah carries a seasonal risk the Pacific gateways do not: the Atlantic hurricane season runs June through November, and a storm approaching the Georgia coast can hold vessels offshore or pause terminal operations for a day or more, which would show up here as a short-lived spike in the ship queue rather than a structural congestion trend.

See the ship queue and Savannah TEU for the live numbers behind this read, and the methodology page for the exact rule.