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작성일 : 15-03-06 03:10
PORT CONGESTION / Wednesday, March 4, 2015
 글쓴이 : VDS KOREA
조회 : 16,195  
Ports of LA, Long Beach say they’ll be back to normal in 3 months

The container logjam at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles will be cleared within three months, the top officials of both ports said today at the 15th annual TPM Conference in Long Beach. But that’s only the beginning of the herculean rebuilding task the Southern California ports face.

Three months is a faster recovery time than many of the 2,000 shippers, carriers and logistics partners at TPM expected. On Monday, an informal poll of TPM attendees found they expect congestion delays for up to six months at the largest U.S. port complex.

However, Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, and Jon Slangerup, chief executive of the Long Beach port, are confident three months is the time they need to return the ports to near-normal conditions. “We need to get our feet back under us in the first month,” Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, said during a panel discussion on what’s next for the ports. “Today we first dipped under 30 vessels at anchor in the breakwater,” he said. “This morning we are working 33 vessels between LA and Long Beach. Last night we had 88 gangs working (ships), and this morning, 101 gangs,” with nearly 3,000 longshore workers. “By the third month, I hope, by working in concert with the liner companies, we can work on how to get the vessels back in a normal order of rotation.”

Clearing the massive container piles built up since November is only the first step, however. Seroka and Slangerup stressed the ports can’t let a situation such as the gridlock caused by the breakdown in contract talks between the Pacific Maritime Association and International Longshore and Warehouse Union to happen again. They also committed the ports, and their tenants, to radically improving container velocity. “The new normal is going to be better than what was before,” Slangerup said. “We’re deluding ourselves to think we can compete on a world stage with sub-standard performance.”

The past few months stripped away any presumptions or illusions about port performance on the West Coast. Even before the ILWU-PMA negotiations lurched “sideways” in November, “congestion was already a problem” at Los Angeles and Long Beach, Slangerup said. As the pileup worsened, shippers began to divert more and more freight to other ports or to air carriers, a loss of business Seroka acknowledged.

“In January, the decline in freight (at Los Angeles) was staggering,” Seroka said. Winning some of that cargo back “will be an extremely heavy lift, to say the least,” he said. “We have to regain confidence from both the cargo owners and the shipping lines.”

“We’ve been meeting with shippers, their partners on the ocean side and with all our terminal operators to evaluate everything and to reassure paying customers we are doing everything possible to manage through the aftermath of this congestion,” Slangerup said.

The longer term view the port leaders offered embraced a more aggressive rethinking of the ports’ role in the supply chain. Both Seroka and Slangerup, whose ports are private “landlord” ports that lease facilities to terminal operators, rather than ports that operate their own terminals, stressed the need for coordination with all supply chain stakeholders, greater investment in facilities, perhaps through public-private partnerships, and more technology.

“There’s no question we’re evolving,” Slangerup said. “We’re not going to be operating ports, but we’re going to be enablers of efficient operations. We need to facilitate significant improvements in the entire supply chain that benefit every stakeholder in that chain.”

The key word is “velocity,” Slangerup said. “We need to drive containers through our ports at velocities that are world class.” That entails changes at the docks to load and unload ships more quickly, and changes at gates to help truckers increase turn times. “In general, these guys and ladies are paid on a trip basis. If they can’t get the runs, they’re not going to earn a living. Enhancing the velocity of those gate turns for those truckers is a central focus.”

That could mean setting up intermediate yards where containers are “peeled off” for pickup and using new technology such as that deployed by Cargomatic to automate services.

“We need the ability to dynamically plan a day’s movement of containers through the ports at the terminal level, and that’s something we don’t have now,” Slangerup said. “That will open up opportunities not just to peel off and pile up containers at an intermediate site for pickup, but having very specific windows for truckers. Getting to three or four turns a day would change the lives of our truckers, and that’s what we have to make happen.”

The ports are also talking to the western railroads about the possibility of short-haul intermodal operations linking the ports and the Inland Empire, Seroka said. However it can be accomplished, the ports are looking at moving containers “in a different way,” he said.

“This isn’t a time when we can rest on our laurels,” Seroka said.