Barges on the Black Warrior River are ready to carry a lot more cargo, and Birmingham’s port is ready to ramp up its shipping and storage capacity.

A new warehouse that looks like an indoor football practice facility with a concrete floor instead of Astroturf has been completed and is now ready for use at the Port of Birmingham.

“This warehouse is part of a bigger vision for Birmingport,” said Birmingham City Council President Darrell O’Quinn.

The facility on the Locust Fork of the Black Warrior River, at 8250 Birmingport Road, has 25,000 square feet of covered storage and is designed to accommodate cold rolled steel coils for logistics operations.

“That warehouse was built specifically for steel coil,” O’Quinn said. “For steel coil, you can’t leave it out in the open and exposed to the weather. Steel coils are extremely heavy. You have to have a special slab there. By extension they can store other materials there.”

The new warehouse will augment the region’s automobile industry, O’Quinn said.

The port warehouse offers rail and waterway connections to markets. With an expected economic impact of $1.2 million, the warehouse is estimated to have a retail sales impact exceeding $800,000, with a total projected retail sales impact approaching $6 million.

“They’re being brought into the Mobile port, shipped inland via barge, then used at our auto manufacturing facilities and elsewhere,” O’Quinn said. “Alabama being an auto-manufacturing heavy state, we have a lot of steel stamping businesses that are suppliers to the automotive industry.

The project is a collaboration between state officials, the City of Birmingham, Jefferson County, the Birmingham Jefferson County Port Authority, and logistics company Watco, with an inland port infrastructure grant administered by the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs.

Watco’s 182-acre Port Birmingham Terminal has five barge docks and a heavy-lift crane for moving steel, coal and other commodities such as synthetic gypsum, scrap and pig iron.

“When you have commodity materials like that, the most efficient means of moving them into the interior of the country is by water on a barge,” O’Quinn said. “It just makes a lot of sense.”

The terminal has railroad tracks that connect to Burlington Northern Railroad, CSX and Norfolk Southern Railway.

Another benefit of increased river shipping is safer highways, O’Quinn said.

“If you see steel coil being moved on a truck, it’ll have maybe one or two steel coils,” he said. “A barge can move dozens of these steel coils.”

The new warehouse will be able to take a lot of the load off the region’s highways, he said.

“That’s a lot of heavy truck traffic that is taken off the interstate between here and Mobile,” O’Quinn said. “Steel coil is notorious for damaging infrastructure.”

“I’m happy to see as much of that come in over the water and off the highways as possible,” O’Quinn said.

Birmingport was founded in 1920 and Tennessee Coal and Iron began using it for shipping in 1930. U.S. Steel began using it in 1967 and it was annexted into the City of Birmingham in 1986. The Birmingham Jefferson County Port Authority was established in 2016.

The new warehouse was announced by regional economic development leaders last year.