Nearly Half A Million Shipping Containers Are Stuck Off The Coast Of Southern California

The Ports Are Operating Below Capacity

Grace Kay   Wed, October 6, 2021,

Ships sit off the coast of Seal Beach, CA, on Tuesday, January 26, 2021. Cargo ships enduring one of the worst U.S. port bottlenecks in more than a decade faced down another obstacle as they waited to offload near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach Brittany Murray/MediaNews Group/Long Beach Press-

Key US ports in Southern California are facing near-record backlogs of cargo ships. The Port of Long Beach has moved to increase operating hours, which may not be enough to fix the issue.

Shortages of workers, equipment, and a lack of coordination across the transportation industry created a ripple effect. The largest port in the US faces a near-record backlog of cargo ships, and there's no end in sight.

On Tuesday, Los Angeles had nearly half a million 20-foot shipping containers - or about 12 million metric tons of goods - waiting in drift areas and at anchor for spots to open up along the port to dock and unload, according to data pulled from the Marine Exchange of Southern California's master queuing list. The port has 19 mega-container ships waiting to dock, the largest of which is carrying 16,022 20-foot shipping containers.

"Part of the problem is the ships are double or triple the size of the ships we were seeing 10 or 15 years ago," Kip Louttit, the executive director of the Marine Exchange of Southern California, told Insider earlier this year. "They take longer to unload. You need more trucks, more trains, more warehouses to put the cargo."

The ports had 90 container ships in the port, 63 of which were waiting off the shore on Tuesday - a number far above the ports pre-pandemic average of zero to one ships at anchor. Due to the volume of ships waiting along the shore, some ships are floating further than 20 miles off the shore in order to keep shipping lanes clear, according to Louttit.

Today, ships at the port can wait in these positions for as long as a month, Marine Exchange data shows. As of Tuesday, a vessel from Asia has been waiting off the coast since September 5 - an issue that experts warn will cause goods to miss the holiday shopping season.

Despite the backlog, ports are operating at lower capacities

The ports are only operating at 60% to 70% capacity, Uffe Ostergaard, president of the North America region for German ship operator Hapag Lloyd told The Wall Street Journal.

"That's a huge operational disadvantage," Ostergaard said, pointing to the fact that the two ports are closed for several hours most days, as well as on Sundays - making it more difficult to keep pace with the ports in Asia and Europe that are sending the goods on a 24/7 schedule.

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