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WEDNESDAY, MAY 26, 2021
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Largest container ship hits East Coast as ports see surge
David Porter
ASSOCIATED PRESS
BAYONNE, N.J. – With the sun gleaming off the
Manhattan skyline in the distance, the massive ship
passed slowly underneath the Bayonne Bridge on
Thursday morning, tooting its horn to the delight of
about two dozen onlookers on the bridge deck hun-
dreds of feet up.
Even by the standards of ocean carriers, the CMA
CGM Marco Polo is a behemoth: three-and-a-half
football fields long – standing on end, it would be
roughly the height of the Eiffel Tower – it can tote more
than 16,000 20-foot-long containers, of the sort trac-
tor-trailers carry one at a time.
It’s the largest container ship ever to call on the East
Coast, and its visit recently to New Jersey; Norfolk,
Virginia; Savannah, Georgia; and Charleston, South
Carolina underscores both the surging volume han-
dled by ports nationwide as COVID-19 restrictions
continue to ease, as well as the billions of dollars spent
by port systems to accommodate these larger ships.
Container volume at U.S. ports lagged a year ago
during the height of the pandemic as manufacturing
slowed, though the demand for goods remained fairly
strong as travel and leisure dollars were shifted to
home improvement projects and online purchases.
Since then, volume has come roaring back. Begin-
ning last August, monthly container volume for the 10
busiest U.S. ports has surpassed 2019 levels, according
to statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of
Transportation. Los Angeles, the only U.S. port busier
than New Jersey/New York, recently had the best April
in its 114-year history and has had nine straight months
of year-over-year increases.
While Los Angeles has been able to accommodate
ships that can carry as many as 23,000 containers, as
recently as four years ago a ship the size of the Marco
At three-and-a-half football fields long, the CMA CGM Marco Polo is the largest container ship ever to call on
the East Coast. SETH WENIG/AP
Polo would have bypassed the ports of New Jersey and
New York because the Bayonne Bridge, which con-
nects New Jersey and Staten Island, was too low and
the port system’s waterways were too shallow.
Spurred by the expansion of the Panama Canal last
decade that allowed larger ships to pass through, New
Jersey/New York and other East Coast ports scram-
bled to capitalize.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
spent nearly $2 billion to raise the bridge by 64 feet, a
feat that required keeping the existing roadway until a
higher roadway was built on top of it; a separate pro-
ject costing about the same amount deepened the
channel in New York harbor.
Savannah’s port, the fourth-busiest in the country,
is in the final stages of a six-year, roughly $1 billion
project to deepen the shipping channel. Officials ex-
pect the port to have handled 5 million containers in
the current fiscal year ending June 30, just four years
after surpassing 4 million for the first time.
The surge in volume has brought its own chal-
lenges, said John Nardi, president of the New York
Shipping Association, which represents ocean carriers
and port terminal operators.
At the New Jersey and New York ports, container
volume in March was 37 percent higher than March
2020, and volumes projected for 2026 in a recent long-
term study by the Port Authority are already being hit
this year, he said. That has significantly increased the
time containers sit at the terminal after they’re un-
loaded.
“It’s everybody, from the truckers to the ware-
houses to the terminals and ocean carriers – every-
body is operating at maximum capacity,” Nardi said.
“The whole supply chain is getting backed up.”
Teacher disarmed school shooter, hugged her until help came
ASSOCIATED PRESS
RIGBY, Idaho – When a student opened fire at an
Idaho middle school, teacher Krista Gneiting directed
children to safety, rushed to help a wounded victim
and then calmly disarmed the sixth-grade shooter,
hugging and consoling the girl until police arrived.
Parents credited the math teacher’s display of com-
passion with saving lives. While two students and the
school custodian were shot May 6, all three survived,
and the gunfire was over within minutes. Gneiting’s
family says bravery and empathy are just part of who
she is.
In an interview with ABC News that aired Wednes-
day, Gneiting said she was preparing her Rigby Middle
School students for their final exams when she heard
the first gunshot down the hall. She looked outside her
classroom and saw the custodian lying on the floor.
She heard two more shots as she closed the door.
“So I just told my students, ‘We are going to leave,
we’re going to run to the high school, you’re going to
run hard, you’re not going to look back and now is the
time to get up and go,’ ” Gneiting said in the interview
shown on “Good Morning America.”
Police said a sixth-grade girl brought the handgun
in her backpack and shot two people inside the school
and one outside. All three were wounded in their limbs
and released from the hospital within a few days.
Gneiting said she was trying to help one of the stu-
dents who had been shot when she saw the girl holding
the gun. She told the wounded student to stay still and
approached the sixth-grader.
“It was a little girl, and my brain couldn’t quite grasp
that,” she said. “I just knew when I saw that gun, I had
to get the gun.”
She asked the girl, “Are you the shooter?” and then
walked closer, putting her hand on the child’s arm and
sliding it down to the gun.
“I just slowly pulled the gun out of her hand, and she
allowed me to. She didn’t give it to me, but she didn’t
fight,” Gneiting said. “And then after I got the gun, I just
pulled her into a hug because I thought, this little girl
has a mom somewhere that doesn’t realize she’s hav-
ing a breakdown and she’s hurting people.”
Gneiting held the girl, consoling her until police ar-
rived.
“After a while, the girl started talking to me, and I
could tell she was very unhappy,” Gneiting said. “I just
kept hugging her and loving her and trying to let her
know that we’re going to get through this together. I do
Two people walk together near the scene of a shooting at a middle school in Rigby, Idaho, on May 6.
Authorities said that two students and a custodian were injured at Rigby Middle School, and a female
student was taken into custody. NATALIE BEHRING/AP
believe that my being there helped her because she
calmed down.”
Once police got there, Gneiting told the girl that an
officer would need to put her in handcuffs, and the
child complied.
“She didn’t respond, she just let him. He was very
gentle and very kind, and he just went ahead and took
her and put her in the police car,” she said.
The girl has been charged in the shooting, but be-
cause juvenile court proceedings are kept sealed in
Idaho, neither her name nor the nature of the charges
has been released.
Gneiting’s brother-in-law, Layne Gneiting, said that
when he first heard about the shooting, he thought
Krista Gneiting’s inner “mother bear” had sprung into
action to protect the students. He soon realized it was
another side of her strong parental instinct.
“Krista is a born mother,” Layne Gneiting wrote in a
Facebook post shortly after the shooting. “Mess with
her kids she’ll rip you apart. Need a hug she’ll hold you
for hours, mingling her tears with yours ... Determina-
tion pushed her to act, but tenderness and motherly
love – not force – lifted the gun from the girl’s hands to
hers.”
Krista Gneiting, meanwhile, said she hopes people
can forgive the girl and help her get the support she
needs.
“She is just barely starting in life and she just needs
some help. Everybody makes mistakes,” she told ABC
News. “I think we need to make sure we get her help
and get her back into where she loves herself so that
she can function in society.”
US cervical cancers fall but other sex-related cancers rise
Carla K. Johnson
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Screening and the HPV vaccine have led to drops in
cervical cancers over the last two decades in the U.S., a
new study finds, but the gains are offset by a rise in
other tumors caused by the virus.
Oral sex is helping fuel more cases of mouth and
throat cancers in men. For older women, anal cancer
and a rare type of rectal cancer caused by HPV may be
more common than cervical cancers by 2025.
“A common misperception is the HPV vaccine has
solved the problem of HPV-associated cancers. Unfor-
tunately, that couldn’t be further from the truth,” said
Dr. Maura Gillison of the University of Texas MD An-
derson Cancer Center, who was not involved in the
study.
Results were released Wednesday by the American
Society of Clinical Oncology ahead of presentation at
its annual meeting next month.
HPV, or human papillomavirus, is the nation’s most
common sexually spread infection. Most HPV infec-
tions cause no symptoms and go away without treat-
ment.
But some cause genital warts and others develop
into cancers, about 35,900 each year, according to the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In the U.S., the HPV vaccine has been recommend-
ed since 2006 for girls at age 11 or 12, and since 2011 for
boys the same age, and catch-up shots are recom-
mended for anyone through age 26 who hasn’t been
vaccinated. Experts agree it will take years to see the
true impact because it can take decades for a chronic
HPV infection to turn into cancer.
What’s driving the HPV cancer trends is the youth-
ful sexual behavior of baby boomers before the vaccine
was out. The vaccine works best when given at young-
er ages before people are exposed to HPV through sex-
ual activity, so it arrived too late for the boomers.
“Sexual trends began changing and liberalizing in
the late ’60s, and continued into the ’70s and ’80s, un-
til the HIV epidemic” caused people to be more cau-
tious, said Dr. Ernest Hawk, cancer prevention spe-
cialist at MD Anderson, who was not involved in the
study.
“People had many more partners and many more
types of interactions,” Hawk said.
Researchers from the U.S. and Taiwan looked at
U.S. cancer statistics from 2001-2017, finding more
than 657,000 cases of HPV-related cancers, 60% in
women and 40% in men. While cervical cancer cases
fell by about 1% per year, other types rose.
For men, oral and throat cancers increased the
most, at nearly 3% a year. For women, anal cancer and
a rare rectal cancer increased the most, also nearly 3%
annually.
The biggest drop in cervical cancers was seen in
young women who would have been the first to get the
HPV vaccine when they were preteens, said lead au-
thor Dr. Cheng-I Liao of Kaohsiung Veterans General
Hospital in Taiwan. That suggests the vaccine played a
role, along with Pap tests, which have been driving
down cervical cancer cases for decades.
No screening tests exist for the other cancers, al-
though research is underway.
One vaccine, Merck’s Gardasil 9, is available in the
U.S. The cost is fully covered by private and public
health insurance.
Vaccination had been increasing before the CO-
VID-19 pandemic and infections were declining dra-
matically among young women. Research suggests the
vaccine was preventing oral infections in men too.
But vaccination dropped off during lockdowns as
families missed routine doctor’s appointments, Hawk
said. Vaccinating middle and high school students for
COVID-19 will give doctors a chance to encourage HPV
shots at the same time, he said.
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