Posted on February 10, 2021
Excerpted from the WSJ, Feb 8, 2021
By Costas Paris
Some container lines and their importing customers are looking for alternate paths to get around bottlenecks at the main U.S. trade gateways in Southern California, where an armada of cargo vessels is anchored offshore at the congested seaports.
Shipping lines have started moving some operations to smaller ports and have canceled some sailings altogether to avoid the backups that have tied up dozens of ships and hundreds of thousands of containers stuffed with goods off the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
France’s CMA CGM SA, the world’s fourth-largest container operator by capacity, said it was replacing a weekly six-ship service from China to Los Angeles with a separate sailing to Oakland, Calif., and Seattle.
The backups have tied up inventories for weeks in some cases as ships wait to reach berths while cargo that has been offloaded sits for long periods at packed freight terminals, where operations have slowed as dockworkers have coped with an outbreak of coronavirus cases.
The supply-chain stresses are rising as a backup of ships waiting to get into the neighbor-ing Southern California ports has grown beyond the number that were anchored during labor strife in 2014.
According to the Marine Exchange of Southern California, which monitors ship traffic at the state’s ports, 37 container ships were anchored off the sprawling Los Angeles and Long Beach complex on Feb. 2, while 27 vessels were at berths, loading and unloading cargo. In the first week of February a year ago, the group counted one ship waiting offshore and 17 at the docks.
“The waiting time to dock is up to seven days on average, depending on the ship type,” said Mario Cordero, executive director at the Port of Long Beach, which handled a record 2.4 million containers in the fourth quarter of 2020, up 23% from the year-earlier period.
Some carriers have canceled sailings rather than have their ships tied up for long stretches at a single port. German container line Hapag-Lloyd AG estimates it has cut between 20% and 30% of its sailings into Southern California in recent months.
