Person in charge of Long Beach Port: In the next six months, I hope the port can return to "normal"

According to the Washington Post, the head of the Port of Long Beach, one of the busiest ports in the United States, said he expects the congestion that caused the turmoil in the supply chain to improve in about six months.

Mario Cordero, executive director of the Port of Long Beach, said at a briefing on Thursday that after the December holiday and the Chinese New Year in February, the bottleneck should begin to ease. Cordero said that in the next six months, he hopes that the port will return to "normal" and that the backlog of the port will improve after the holiday. But he added that there is an important factor that must be considered, and that is the impact of the new crown epidemic, which may extend the time to recovery.

Unprecedented consumer demand, coupled with the shortage of truck drivers and warehouse workers during the epidemic, has led to long queues of ships and piles of containers full of cargo in US ports.

Cordero said that despite the setbacks, Long Beach dock workers and terminal operators have handled 8.6 million TEU containers between January and November this year, breaking the record of 8.1 million TEU last year. He said that the port is expected to handle more than 9 million TEUs in 2021, becoming the year with the largest container handling volume in its 110-year history.

▎True supply chain relief requires end-to-end recovery of the supply chain

According to JOC, 2021 is about to end in a state of continued chaos, and supply chain problems will continue until next year. The quality of a system depends on its weakest link, so progress in a certain link will not automatically translate into system-wide improvement.

Although the number of long-term stranded containers in the Port of Los Angeles/Long Beach has decreased by nearly 40%, the number of ships waiting for berths outside the Port of Los Angeles-Long Beach is still high, and port transportation has not been significantly eased. In addition, the continued strong import volume next year may extend the time to "return to normal".

Some freight forwarders say that trucking (drayage) is still an obstacle for several months and may even worsen.

Regarding truck transportation, Trond Prestroenning, CEO of the German freight forwarding company Fr.Meyer'Sohn Americas, said: "Southern California and the northwest are still a problem, and now the southeast is also experiencing more and more problems. In the past month or so, Here, we have seen the situation become very tense, becoming a small Los Angeles situation."

In addition, downstream capabilities are limited. According to Colliers data, the vacancy rate of distribution centers throughout Southern California is less than 1%. Coupled with the ongoing shortage of warehouse labor, this means that there is almost no additional warehouse capacity to handle more goods.

However, there are others who say that the situation in the interior is improving, especially in terms of multimodal transport and warehousing.

Hub Group CEO Dave Yeager said in a webinar on December 3 that he saw a large amount of investment from railways gradually helping to improve services. Although not immediately returning to the state of 2019, he did see that the situation began to change. Alleviated. Another improvement is that the bottleneck of the warehouse is decreasing, and most importantly, the cargo capacity of the warehouse has been improved. In addition, with the substantial increase in wages, a considerable number of highway drivers have switched to multimodal transport.

After the congestion of multimodal transport has eased, the BNSF Railway and the Union Pacific Railway have stopped restricting the number of containers transported from the west coast of the United States to the inland. Earlier this year, UP restricted the acceptance of multimodal cargo from the west coast to clear its inland railroad ramps.

Although railroad and trucking companies in the western United States stated that the supply chain has not returned to normal, they said that the severe congestion that occurred earlier this year in major intermodal hubs such as Chicago, Dallas, Kansas City, and Memphis has been substantially in the past three months. ease.