Flooding may damage city’s coffee warehouses

WASHINGTON — When Hurricane Katrina ripped through the New Orleans area, it tore through one of the biggest waterfront warehousing areas in the United States, disrupting the delivery and importation of an American staple — coffee.

The New York Board of Trade on Tuesday declared that a force majeure situation exists at the port. That’s a situation in which an act of nature voids the terms of contract and it means that delivery notices for coffee traded before Tuesday are suspended.

New Orleans is synonymous with coffee and it was the nation’s top coffee port until 2003, when it lost that title to New York.

Coffee industry officials continue to watch events unfold on the Gulf Coast. The coffee industry fears potential flood damage to massive coffee supplies in storage. The Chicago Board of Trade said there were almost 733,000 bags of coffee, each weighing 132 or 150 pounds, in storage in New Orleans on the day Katrina came ashore.

“So far it looks as if there isn’t a lot of damage to the warehouses,” said Joe DeRupo, spokesman for the National Coffee Association in New York, which represents importers and roasters of coffee beans. “We still don’t know whether water has gotten into the warehouses or not.”

Because New Orleans accounts for about a sixth of the nation’s coffee storage, any damage could affect U.S. coffee prices.