The Port That Helped Build Silicon Valley

Jock O’Connell

My first job on moving to California as a freshly minted college graduate in the summer of 1970 was in a peach orchard in Sunnyvale. But the work had nothing to do with farming. I had been hired by a company called Memorex then largely known as a manufacturer of high-end audio tapes. Older readers may recall a television commercial from that era that featured jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald hitting a high note that shattered a wine glass. The ad then showed a recording of Ella’s voice on a Memorex tape achieving the same result. “Is it live or is it Memorex?” became the company’s slogan for the next couple of decades.

Memorex was one of the swelling number of electronics firms springing up at the south end of the San Francisco Peninsula that would ensure that that Sunnyvale peach orchard – along with nearly every other farming operation within miles – would soon be history. Over the next few years, Santa Clara County, which once boasted of being the world’s canning and dried-fruit packing capital, shrugged off its rich agricultural heritage. Along with neighboring San Mateo County, it embraced a new moniker: Silicon Valley.

Histories of the rise of Silicon Valley tend overwhelmingly to focus on the personalities of the engineers, entrepreneurs, and investors who built “the most efficient capital-accumulation machine in history”, as internet pundit Benjamin Tarnoff wrote recently in The New York

Review of Books. So we know a lot about William Hewlett, David Packard, William Shockley, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison.

By contrast, almost nothing is written about the people and organizations who actually built the buildings that house Silicon Valley. With its gray precast concrete walls, the structure in which I worked in that Sunnyvale peach orchard was typical of the era. But someone built it with construction materials sourced from somewhere.

That’s where the Port of Redwood City comes in. It is a vital terminal for imported sand and gravel used to make concrete.

The port lies about midway down the San Francisco Peninsula. It is located south of the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge, the first iteration of which was constructed across the South Bay in 1929 and thus predates both the Golden Gate and San Francisco-Oakland spans. At the time of its construction, it was the longest bridge in the country at seven miles. (It’s still California’s longest bridge.) As rebuilt in 1967, the bridge features a hump (technically, an orthotropic span) with a vertical clearance of 135 feet (41 meters) over the waterline. Still, the port’s 30-foot channel depth prevents fully-loaded vessels from reaching the port’s wharves. That’s why ships carrying sand and gravel normally call first at the Port of Richmond to offload cargo before proceeding south to Redwood City.

We seldom give any thought to concrete. It is ubiquitous but anonymous. It’s been around for over two millennia since the Romans gave a name (opus caementicium) to the cement that binds it all together. Combine lime or calcium silicate-based cement with aggregates like sand and gravel, and you have an exceedingly versatile material for constructing buildings, bridges, and roads. But the ingredients are not cheaply or easily transported. Aggregates are heavy and of such low value that trucking them from a quarry to a construction site quickly becomes prohibitively expensive.

According to the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), shipping costs for aggregates can outweigh production costs if the material is trucked more than 20 miles. Moreover, in a region like the San Francisco Bay Area that likes to flaunt its environmental consciousness, sourcing aggregates from local quarries poses a political quandary. The California Geological Survey found in 2018 that no more than six percent of the identified aggregate sources in the state had been permitted for mining activities by local regulatory agencies. In some areas of the state, Caltrans estimates that available aggregate supply could be depleted within a decade.

One preferred alternative to fighting the battles to open new sources of sand and gravel is to import them by ship. In the case of Silicon Valley, that involves the Port of Redwood City.

Ironically, it’s a port that began life around 1850 shipping timber from the Peninsula to San Francisco to house the burgeoning Gold Rush population. So successful were loggers in depleting Peninsula’s forests that a century later those materials had to be imported to accommodate the Peninsula’s wartime needs.

1,729,931 short tons of cargo passed through the port in 2021, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Of that, only about 2.5% involved domestic shipments. Almost all of the import tonnage arriving at the port are commodities used in the construction industry. Last year, Sand (44.0%), Gravel (26.8%), and Gypsum (17.4%) were the chief imports by weight. The sources are not terribly exotic. All of the sand and gravel imported through the port came from Canada, while virtually all of the gypsum was sourced in Mexico.

In this century, import tonnage at the Port of Redwood City has generally tracked the ups and downs of the region’s high-tech economy, as Exhibit A indicates. The electronics industry was recovering from the Dot.Com bust in the early years of the century but then ran up against the foreclosure crisis. Variations in interest rates together with higher tariffs imposed on high-tech exports have since shaped demand for the construction materials imported through the port.

The aggregates entering the Port of Redwood City are sourced from the Polaris Mine in British Columbia. Polaris is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Vulcan Materials Company of Birmingham, Alabama. The company holds an 88% interest in the Orca Quarry, a sand and gravel deposit that covers an area of approximately 350 hectares in British Columbia. Through long-term shipping agreement with CSL Americas (a subsidiary of Canadian Shipping Lines), Polaris ships construction grade sand, gravel, and crushed stone to the West Coast of the U.S. and to Hawaii.

Typical of the trade was the arrival on September 16 of the Honourable Henry Jackman, a 42-year-old, self-discharging bulk carrier that is part of the CSL Americas fleet. The ship is 245 meters long with a beam of 32 meters. It departed Port McNeill in British Columbia on September 12 and steamed under the Golden Gate Bridge three days later. It called at the Port of Richmond for just over twenty hours on September 16 before sailing down to the Port of Redwood City to discharge its remaining cargo to help Silicon Valley continue to expand and flourish.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in Jock’s commentaries are his own and may not reflect the positions of the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association.