Bethann Rooney is at peace when she’s at sea.
The director of the Port of New York, however, was forced to change course as a young woman, having initially trained to work on ships.
She’s built her career, instead, on land.
One could say that Rooney’s ascent has been in the eye of the storm of New York City’s recent history – including the terrorist attacks of Sept 11, 2001, the Blackout of 2003, Hurricane Sandy in 2012; and the Covid pandemic beginning in 2020.
She’d just finished a job interview with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey at One World Trade Center on Feb. 26, 1993, when a bomb went off in an underground garage. Eight years later she was based at an office on the 64th floor of the same building when it was attacked and destroyed – the first tower to be hit and the second to fall. She followed the news from the nation’s capital on that day, before beginning her journey home overnight.
From Sept. 12, 2001, Rooney helped chart a new way for the Port of New York by putting in place an emergency response system that proved durable in diverse crises later on.
It all began as a happy accident. Rooney was getting ready to study accounting at an all-women’s Catholic college when a different idea took hold of her imagination.
“I met some young men who were at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy,” she said “and I was just fascinated by the idea of going around the world on ships as part of the college experience.
“I went home and I told my parents that I wanted to be a merchant marine. They said pretty much, ‘The hell you will.’ They didn’t know what it was,” she recalled. “And, honestly I had only heard about it hours beforehand.”
TRAINING SHIP
The young Rooney, whose forebears in Ireland included fishermen out of Drogheda and watchmen on the River Boyne, was not to be dissuaded.
“So, I totally changed my trajectory. I went to New York Maritime College with the intent of becoming a ship’s captain and sailing around the world,” she said. That institution, from which she got a master’s in international transportation and a bachelor’s in marine transportation, is part of the SUNY system, as well as being one of six such maritime state colleges nationwide.
She spent three summers on the school’s training ship, and had wintertime stints as a cadet observer on two different container ships and an Exxon oil tanker.
“I really fell in love with the idea of going to sea,” she said.
Rooney passed her licensed exams, but was prevented from obtaining her full license on medical grounds. “I had a problem with my eyesight,” she said. “And so, I never was able to fulfill my new dream of going to sea.”
The Rockland County native began her working life with a two-and-a-half year spell as a port captain and vessel agent with General Steamship Corporation.
It had its compensations. “At least I had a job walking across the platform,” Rooney said.
“In retrospect it was a job I was very lucky to have because it gave me a crash course in all the various types of ships I had only worked with in textbooks in a class,” she added. “It was an excellent way to start.”
Next stop, her first interview with the Port Authority. She’d come down the stairs and found a payphone to tell her father that it had gone well.
“The bomb went off beneath me,” Rooney remembered about that call. Her father heard it and asked what had happened.
“I don’t know, but everybody’s running. I think I better go,” she told him, quickly ending their conversation.
Nowadays, Rooney as port director is in the top tier of the leadership of the bistate agency, whose official remit covers the 26-mile radius around the Statue of Liberty. It’s answerable to the governors of New Jersey and New York, with its chairman appointed by the former and its executive director by the latter. Each of the main business areas – aviation, rail or port, for example – has a director, who reports to the chief operating officer, who in turn reports to the executive director. Rooney is the director of the Port of New York and New Jersey.
“I didn’t know the scope and magnitude of the Port Authority,” she said about the agency when she first applied.
Her first posting was at Port Newark in Elizabeth, but after a while she was talent-spotted by the higher-ups.
“Lillian Barone, who was the first female port director in the world, saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself, honestly, and said to me that I needed to come into the city to work in our headquarters at the original World Trade Center,” Rooney remembered.
“I did it kicking and screaming. Working at the facility you’re in jeans, work boots and golf shirts and sweatshirts. The World Trade Center at the time was extremely formal – business suits and trench coats and briefcases. And it just wasn’t my cup of tea.
“I cried for weeks going into the Trade Center,” she said, “but I became acclimated.”
Rooney never applied for another job until the port director’s position opened up in 2022.
“Every time there was a new challenge, they just tapped me to do it,” she said.
It’s what happened after the calamitous terrorist attacks of 9/11 had left thousands of people dead in her place of work.
Although the Port Authority lost 84 people overall, Rooney’s own department was relatively fortunate to suffer just one fatality, a victim of falling debris in the concourse. Everyone else got out of One World Trade Center safely.
“I left on the first train that left Washington about 4 a.m. on the 12th,” she said. “I’d no idea about the status of my colleagues and co-workers.”
NO JOB DESCRIPTION
Rooney reached Newark, and from there she took a taxi as far as she could into Manhattan and then walked to where the port’s top leaders were based. Port Director Rick Larrabee, a retired rear admiral in the U.S. Coast Guard, was among them. She recalled, “Rick gave me a hug and a kiss and said, ‘Thank God, you’re okay.’”
He then asked her, “What do you know about security?”
“I said ‘nothing,’” she remembered of that conversation, “And he said, “Great! You’re in charge!’
“I don’t know if the port director was going to tap the next person who came into the room, or if he was specifically thinking about Beth Rooney.”
She said, “Maritime security regulations did not exist anywhere in the world. Everything about security was about keeping stuff inside the container. It wasn’t about risks or threats to ships.
“It was a job that had no job description, no lessons learned from somebody who came before me and, basically, I had to figure it out.”
Rooney and her staff were instrumental in writing the international and national laws that are in place today, programs that are recognized throughout the world.
“It changed me in a way that it gave me confidence that I never had in myself, and gave me the opportunity, the exposure. I was testifying before U.S. Congress, meeting with people at all levels of the Administration,” she said.
Rooney had to convince officials that certain things had to be done; that investment was needed to prevent another catastrophe.
“So, when something goes bad, we need to be ready for it,” she said.
The Port of New York’s emergency management focus became such that it was more easily able to deal with a blackout, a hurricane, a global health crisis and other eventualities.
“That’s how we got through the pandemic,” Rooney said.
More than a decade after the 9/11 attacks, Rooney would make her name with a rather lower-profile challenge than external security threats – fixing the worst congestion in the port’s history.
It started as a casual Friday afternoon conversation with Larrabee, the director. “He was lamenting to me about the problems,” Rooney remembered. She didn’t agree with his proposed solution. “He said, ‘What’s the answer?’ I said, ‘I don’t really know but let me think about it over the weekend and I’ll get back to you.’” She wrote a white paper over that weekend and gave it to Larrabee on the Monday morning, and by the following Friday it had been shared with the Port Authority’s leaders and both governors.
“We went public with what became the Port Performance Task Force, which is the precursor of what today is the Council on Port Performance.” This month, the port is celebrating 10 years of that forum.
“It was certainly the first forum of its kind in the world, where it takes this very complex intertwined industry, breaks down the silos in between all of the various players and brings them together to work for the good of the whole.
“Each has to be working together,” she said. “When one part of the system is not working then nobody’s working efficiently and if nobody is working efficiently then nobody is making money efficiently.”
Rooney continued, “We’ve used this forum for the last 10 years to proactively address problems and occasionally we’re reacting to problems.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that the Port of New York was able to withstand a 23 percent increase in cargo volume during the pandemic without any problems because we had this collaborative network,” she added. “Who, the moment the pandemic was identified as a problem, was meeting daily for months and then it went to weekly.”
DATA-DRIVEN
They started with a report that had 23 recommendations. “Our initial success was about implementing those recommendations,” she said. “Today we are doing weekly report cards on the port’s overall performance.
“If we see the trend going in the wrong direction, then we can say, ‘Okay guys – what’s going on? What do we need to do in order to address it?’”
As the architect of the Council on Port Performance, Rooney was eventually given a newly created position, assistant director focused on performance and efficiency.
Data is crucial, she believes.
“For example, during the pandemic we saw that the number of empty containers that were sitting in the port was growing exponentially, and we saw that before we started to hear from the port community that there’s no place to put the empty containers,” she said. “And when the trucker had no place to deliver the empty container the wheels underneath the container weren’t available to pick up the next load. And that then creates congestion and backups.
“So, we used that data to create a program to incentivize the ocean carriers to take the empty containers that they own out of the port in order to create the efficiencies for the rest of the supply chain.”
Failure to evacuate containers within certain time frames have financial penalties, because, ultimately, they cost the port money in terms of extra policing of traffic, for instance, and maintenance staff helping the police.
“You can use it to manipulate your story or use it to influence your behavior,” Rooney said of data.
They’re using the data to ask, “What information does this tell us and what actions do we need to take?” and “How do we get ahead of it?”
Rooney added, “When we started to do that, it was before AI, and now we’re looking at how do we leverage the data that we have to be even more informed and more proactive about what we do.”
Being director now means Rooney is less involved with the day-to-day operations, and more with longer-term vision and planning,
“We’ve got limited resources. Where do we expend our efforts?” she said.
“Everything that we do within the port has to be in the context of the broader region,” Rooney said. “So, a lot of what I’m doing as director is managing the broader regional impacts and authorizations that we need to get from our board. It’s bigger picture. Regional impact, industry impact. Longer term strategic planning and development.”
IRISH TRADITIONS
She’s focused on “Operating a premier port in the United States that is safe, secure and sustainable, is operationally efficient, and also financially sound. So those five pillars are woven through everything that we do.”
She continues in the Irish-American tradition of Austin Tobin, the lawyer who was director of the Port Authority from 1942 through to 1972, and historically one of New York’s most respected public servants. Tobin built the bistate agency into the powerhouse that it became.
He had allies, like the Jesuit priest the Rev. John M. Corridan, when fighting a battle against business and labor corruption in the port. Things began to change with the founding of the Waterfront Commission, which had its own police force, and also with containerization, from 1956 onwards. There are now 5,000 members of the International Longshoremen’s Association members working in the port, whereas once there were 10s of thousands, a large proportion of them Irish American, on either side of the Hudson River.
The bistate Waterfront Commission instituted background checks of longshoremen to rid the waterfront of crime and Mob influence, but after 9/11 all members of Port Authority’s staff had to have federal background checks and credentials that allows them to work in a secure maritime area, including the 200 or so people who are employed in Rooney’s Port Department.
In addition to the latter group, the Port Department shares staff with the rest of the PA-NYNJ in areas such as procurement, legal affairs, engineering, law enforcement, human resources and finance.
Rooney, who directs this world-leading 21st century port, is very proud of and connected to her roots back in Ireland.
The family genealogists have found it difficult to find concrete information about the Rooneys who were from Newry, Co. Down; but their paternal grandmother was a Reynolds, a family of carpenters, as well as fishermen and river watchmen, who married into the McGuinness family who were herders. Her grandmother was niece of a renowned Knowth, Co. Meath-born painter whose trade banners are part of the collection on view in Drogheda Museum.
A large family group organized by Beth Rooney arrived this past summer to announce, “We are the family of William J. Reynolds.”
The front of the Boyne Fishermen's Banner by William J. Reynolds.
The museum staff was delighted to meet kin of the painter. He died early of the fumes and the paints that he used and his friends raised funds at home and abroad to commemorate him. “It’s the largest monument in the town cemetery,” said his great-niece. “It’s unbelievable.”
It was a trip of 18 – which included Rooney’s wife Gina. Their daughter, who was adopted from Guatemala, was the youngest at age 22, while Rooney’s father was the oldest at 79. (The port director has one sibling, a brother, who didn’t travel; her mother died six years ago.)
“Are we going to be talking to one another when we’re home?” they joked beforehand.
“Thankfully there was no drama. It was an epic trip and we just had a fantastic time,” said Rooney of a tour that took in Belfast and its Titanic Quarter.
The back of the Boyne Fishermen's Banner by William J. Reynolds.
Her Reynolds great-grandfather came over on the Lusitania in 1908. Her grandmother was one of seven children in the first American generation, and she herself had seven children, the only ones born in the second generation. The grandmother’s siblings were two Catholic priests, a Franciscan sister and others who didn’t get married or had no children if they did.
Multiple generations lived in Rooney’s father’s Eastchester, N.Y., home and it came to the point whereby he and his sister, as the oldest, lived with neighbors for a time.
“Family, family, family, it’s all about family,” Rooney said about her interests. “I enjoy photography. We certainly love to travel.
“Some of the Reynoldses, the Catholic priests, had started a family reunion back in the late ‘80s. Over the years as they were getting older and retiring, I took that over.
“Once I had my own place I started an annual Christmas party,” said the Rockland County resident.
“We could have 40 to 50 people at our house for a summer family reunion or a Christmas party,” she added.
Said Bethann Rooney, director of the Port of New York, “Family is really the cornerstone of my life.”
