TL;DR: South Carolina Ports will halt container operations at the Hugh K. Leatherman Terminal starting Aug. 1, shifting roughly five weekly MSC vessel calls to the Wando Welch and North Charleston terminals. The real story isn't soft demand. It's that a terminal staffed entirely under a 2024 union labor ruling became the most expensive berth in the port, and even a modest downturn was enough to take it offline first.
South Carolina Ports said Thursday it will wind down container handling at the Hugh K. Leatherman Terminal over the coming weeks, with a full pause starting Aug. 1. Cargo will consolidate at the Wando Welch and North Charleston terminals. SC Ports President and CEO Micah Mallace framed it as a short-term response to softer trade forecasts for the back half of 2026, and the port's own numbers support that: container volume through 11 months of fiscal 2026 is running about 4.7% below budget.
That's the headline. It's not the most useful part to understand.
Leatherman opened in 2021 but didn't run at scale until September 2024, after a Supreme Court decision settled a multi-year jurisdiction fight in favor of the International Longshoremen's Association. Every crane and yard job at the terminal now belongs to ILA Local 1422, whose membership grew from 234 workers in 2024 to 321in 2026, according to filings with the US Department of Labor. That's a fully unionized cost base, and it runs higher than what the port pays at Wando Welch and North Charleston, where state employees and union labor are mixed.
In other words, Leatherman was the port's most expensive terminal to operate well before demand softened. State Sen. Larry Grooms, who chairs the South Carolina Senate's transportation committee, said as much last fall, telling local reporters the terminal was "too costly to operate right now" and that the port needed assurances from ocean carriers willing to absorb that cost. When volume dipped, Leatherman wasn't just underused. It was the first facility taken offline.
That distinction matters for anyone tempted to read this as a one-off. A terminal's cost structure, not just its physical capacity, is increasingly what determines which facility survives a downturn. Other US gateways negotiating new labor agreements, or weighing similar all-union staffing models, should treat Charleston as a live data point rather than background noise.
Mediterranean Shipping Co. is effectively Leatherman's only customer, running close to five weekly vessel calls there with post-Panamax ships in the 8,000-TEU range. One of those routes is being dropped outright due to softer global volumes. The rest move to North Charleston, while larger vessels that can't clear the I-526 Don Holt Bridge shift instead to Wando Welch.
If your cargo books on MSC services calling Charleston, this isn't a wait-and-see situation. It's an immediate routing check. Confirm with your carrier or NVOCC which terminal your specific vessel string will discharge at after Aug. 1. Wando Welch and North Charleston run different gate hours, chassis pools, and rail connections than Leatherman did, so a booking confirmation written before this week may no longer reflect where your container actually lands.
SC Ports has been consistent in calling this a pause rather than a closure, and Mallace told the Journal of Commerce the terminal will reopen once cargo growth resumes. But when local reporters pressed SC Ports for a reopening date, the answer was that there isn't one. Operations resume "when the cost of operating three terminals is justified by the volume," which is a fair business answer and not a planning input.
Two other developments are worth weighing alongside that "short-term" framing. SC Ports has separately delayed a $690 million rail yard adjacent to Leatherman that was originally planned to open this year, while construction on the terminal's second berth is continuing toward an expected 2027 completion, according to the SC Daily Gazette. Read together, that's a port pulling back on near-term capacity while still betting on long-term growth at the same site. For planning purposes, treat the August pause as open-ended, even though the long-term outlook for the facility hasn't changed.
SC Ports is also reportedly evaluating proposals from outside terminal operators to lease and run Leatherman directly, with responses to an April request for proposals due in June. A private operator could restructure the labor cost equation in ways the port authority alone cannot. That's the development to watch if you're trying to gauge when, or under what terms, Leatherman comes back online.
A few concrete items are worth working through now, rather than waiting for a service disruption to surface them.
Confirm discharge terminal assignments for any active or upcoming MSC bookings tied to Charleston, and update internal routing guides accordingly. Check drayage and chassis arrangements with your trucking partners — gate congestion risk typically rises at the remaining terminals when a meaningful share of a port's capacity gets folded into two facilities. Revisit lead times for shipments planned for late July through Q4, since this transition lands during a period SC Ports itself expects to be flat to down on volume. And if rail connectivity through North Charleston is part of your routing, confirm the $690 million rail yard delay doesn't affect any inland move you were counting on.
None of this calls for alarm. Charleston remains a functioning, growing port, with two terminals already carrying the bulk of its volume. But a routing assumption that held last week may not hold after Aug. 1, and that's worth thirty minutes with your carrier rep rather than finding out at the gate.
Source:https://www.joc.com/article/charlestons-leatherman-terminal-to-temporarily-halt-ship-operations-by-august-6243525
