It's amazing that you can see supply chain backlogs out the car window. Every container ship that can't be unloaded represents the collective pain of thousands of engineers, project managers, builders, retail store operators, and individual consumers all wondering where the hell their stuff is.
It turns out the problem is a combination of record high shipments into Oakland, extra traffic from ships diverted from Long Beach, a couple of the unloading cranes being out of service, and lots of Oakland dockworkers being home sick with COVID. The parking lot for ships in the Bay is full, so even more are starting to park outside the Golden Gate.
IIRC in 2020 I saw the opposite problem, when the Bay Area was filling up with empty ships because global trade had essentially stopped, and the cruise ship that had hundreds of COVID cases was emergency-parked at one of the Oakland freight terminals.
I recall a new plan to have more of the ships anchor themselves more miles out, in part to facilitate smoother docking when they are actually eligible to hit the port ... and likely in part to hide how extensive the backlog is.
Even if you could run every boat through the Port of Oakland faster you still have downstream issues routing those products to trucks and then getting them across a country that never really kept up with railway infrastructure.
We can't do anything except redline the engines along existing pathways, it feels like. There's no pivot, no alternative, except scattered reports to route more ships through the canal and towards the great lakes in smaller, more nimble, more resource-consumptive vessels?
Nice post and this is about boxes on a ship to other place, and we also have the Covid19, thankful most of us are able to have the vaccine and it's safer to have one, and we are reminded that we have vaccinated again and we go back to the center again guys.
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