Ports in Seattle, Tacoma and Vancouver face increasing competion for the booming business of handling containers from Asia. Now maybe add Coos Bay, Ore. to the list of rivals.
A proposal would turn the isolated Pacific coast town into a major container port. A Danish shipping company would invest hundreds of millions of dollars to develop the port, which would then need improved rail connections inland.
There are big port-construction plans all along the West Coast, from a huge project in Prince Rupert to the coast of Mexico. Here's how a Coos Bay spokesman put it:
"This is a frog, and we continue to keep kissing this frog in hopes that it'll be something better than a frog," says Martin Callery, the Coos Bay port's director of communications and freight mobility.