November was a record month for the San Pedro Bay ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Los Angeles handled 889,746 TEU, a 22% increase year-on-year, while Long Beach handled 783,523 TEU (+30.6%).

Throughput would have been even higher were it not for the congestion that both ports are experiencing. Los Angeles Executive Director Gene Seroka said that on 30 November 12 vessels were waiting at anchor to get into LA, with over 100,000 TEU onboard.

While the ports welcomed a return to growth in container traffic after the first five months of 2020, the whole supply chain around the San Pedro Bay ports is under pressure. Toy companies are struggling to get Christmas goods off vessels, through the ports and into shops, and are warning that some goods will not arrive in time for Christmas.

Noatum Logistics has advised its clients that the whole supply chain beyond the ports is under pressure as the surge makes its way through the system. “Import distribution centres that typically receive much of this import volume for segregation and distribution are filled beyond capacity, further adding to the port congestion with a domino effect on trucking delays, increased truck turn-times and finally, rail congestion and delays”.

Port of Los Angeles Executive Director Gene Seroka was more positive at the port’s monthly press conference on its cargo numbers. He noted that it is unusual to see the peak season surge extend into late December. Through its Port Optimizer and The Signal tools Los Angeles now has greater forward visibility, and is expecting to handle 850,000 TEU in January 2021, which would be a 5% increase year-on-year.

That growth in container traffic is expected to continue into 2021 is good news, but the number of vessels waiting at anchorage remains “a true concern for all of us,” Seroka said. On 15 November there were 23 vessels waiting for a berth, of which 14 were bound for LA. Of the 88 vessels to call at LA in November, 50 waited at anchorage for an average of 2.5 days. So far in December, 80% of vessels have had to wait at anchorage, and the average wait has grown to four days.

It is not just at the berth that there are delays – “every part of the supply chain has been stretched and pushed” said Seroka. Port dwell time has increased to 5 days and “street dwell time,” the time a container is waiting to get to a warehouse or destination, reached 7.1 days in November. It is normally 3.5 days.

To help manage the surge, the ports have tried to make more space available for container and chassis storage away from the marine terminals. Los Angeles has found additional space for chassis storage, while Long Beach has opened a new staging area for import containers and found additional space for empty container storage. LA is planning an incentive scheme that would reward terminal operators for supporting dual transactions at the gate, where a trucker drops an empty export box and collects an import container in a single trip to the port.

These measures have had some success, and Seroka noted that the street dwell time for containers moving through Los Angeles has dropped to 6.3 days in December, but the ports are currently far from fluid.

On the face of it, it looks like shippers and cargo owners are trying to push more cargo through the San Pedro system at a greater pace than it can handle. Call exchanges, which now average over 10,000 containers at Los Angeles, cannot be evacuated into the supply chain in the timeline customers expect currently. When vessels are waiting at anchor and dwell time in the yard has hit five days, what options are left to push more boxes through the system?

Seroka rejected the suggestion that Los Angeles might be approaching capacity. The STS cranes at the port are operational 55% of hours in a week, and simulations and planning performed for the port show that, in fact, it has plenty of spare capacity, he argued. To boost fluidity, Seroka continues to advocate that the industry fully embraces digitalization to improve supply chain planning and, in particular, he wants all players at the Port of Los Angeles to be able to scale up for peak periods. Progress is being made, he said, with a 60% increase in the number of stakeholders registering for the Port Optimizer portal.