Nearly nine out of ten Americans say their daily commute begins with the crank and cough of a car motor. The remainder report that their morning journeys start with the music of coins falling into fare boxes, or the well-oiled click of bicycle freewheels, or the ancient rhythm of soles on sidewalks. The U.S. Census keeps careful track of these commuter statistics. And, data aside, daily experience and preferences suggest these numbers make sense.
Yet the numbers mislead.
For all our preoccupation with its foibles and frustrations, our actual morning rides or walks to work are the least part of our commutes. They are not the first steps in our daily movements but the very last legs in a far longer, far more mysterious daily journey built on the thousands, even millions of miles embedded in our everyday lives, choices, and actions.
So where does our commute truly begin if not in our driveways?
More than anyplace else, the starting line can be found high atop the windswept Pacific bluff of Angels Gate where, seven days a week, the most valuable shopping list in America is created.
There, inside the whitewashed, antennae-studded headquarters of the Marine Exchange, a very pleasant, very busy mother of four by the name of Debbie Chavez crafts the Magna Carta of the buy-it-now, same-day-delivery world: the Master Queuing List. With it, Chavez holds the lion’s share of America’s consumer economy in her hands.
If you drive it, wear it, eat it, buy it, drink it, talk into it, type on it, or listen to it, some portion has first passed by Angels Gate. From the morning cup of coffee to the tires on your car to the bike you bought to replace that car to the shoes on your feet and the smartphone in your pocket, all or part passed in and out of the control of Debbie Chavez before it entered your life.
“We do keep busy here,” Chavez observes with the casual understatement of a woman who does something extraordinary so often that she mistakes it for routine.
For generations, Angels Gate has been prized for its coastal vantage point. First came the cannons placed early in the last century to stave off unwanted invasion via the waters below. Later Angels Gate became the ideal spot to track a more benevolent but no less disruptive commercial invasion in the form of a daily, miles-long procession of giant cargo vessels laden with . . . everything.
The blocky Marine Exchange control center’s one notable architectural feature, its ocean-facing picture window, offers one of the great juxtapositions in California topography. To the right is a million-dollar view of sun-dappled waves, the rocky enclave of the Palos Verdes peninsula, and the gorgeous green mountain of Catalina Island in the distance. To the left is a $400 billion view of the hard metal angles and industrial bristle of the twin Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the busiest harbor complex in North America, serving as both barometer and driver of the U.S. economy.
Each day in predawn darkness, Chavez and her crew of marine information specialists arrive at Angels Gate to chart the approaching parade of cargo vessels, gathering cryptic information received via phone, e-mail, and old-school fax from the world’s far-flung maritime shipping lines. The product of these labors is a master daily schedule for a hundred or more impending ship departures, arrivals, crossings of the two-hundred-mile international limit, and shifts to the marine terminal docks from remote harbor anchoring spots (the waterfront equivalent of the doctor’s waiting room). Once dockside, the mammoth ships need two to five days to unload and reload before leaving for their next port of call and making room for the next vessel, which means every berth has a waiting line behind it.
Those lines are no small matter: one container ship can be as long as four football fields laid end to end, with as many as 7,000 giant shipping containers filling its hold and stacked on its deck. (There are even bigger container ships sailing now and larger still on the drawing board, but the Southern California ports lack the necessary colossal cranes and other infrastructure to accommodate them—for the moment.) At any one time, fifty such ships may be lingering at the dual ports of LA, waiting their turn.
As much as a billion and a half dollars’ worth of product passes through these twin ports every day. Delays can break businesses nationwide and cost consumers millions, interrupting the cornucopia of endeavors the port makes possible: the installation of new air bags in recalled cars, the delivery of the latest computers, the flow and pricing of gasoline, the supply of those all-important silicon chips that are inside everything—from coffeemakers to cash registers to the controllers that keep our traffic lights functioning at hundreds of thousands of intersections. Without that cargo and its timely delivery, all that and so much more grinds to a halt. The Master Queuing List is the essential first step that sets off a well-choreographed transportation chain reaction—the commute to end all commutes.
First, Debbie Chavez sends out the list to inform the work of the traffic controllers and Coast Guard officers at the Marine Exchange “Watch” peering at their radar and computer displays. They direct and police the approaching vessels.
Then the Master Queuing List is used to schedule the port pilots who race out to meet the ships and guide the laden behemoths in and out of their berths.
The list is next used to staff the day shift with the right number of crane operators, those princes of the docks who lift twenty-ton containers from impossibly tight quarters with the finesse (and pay scale) of brain surgeons.
Then comes the assembly of longshore gangs to unload the goods, and the stevedores in the marine terminals who move and prepare the cargo for shipment out of the port.
Finally, the Master Queuing List is used to dispatch the 40,000 or more big-rig truck trips that swarm into, out of, and around the twin ports every twenty-four hours, carrying the cargo out into the concentric circles of warehouse distribution centers, freight depots, and rail yards that make up America’s goods-movement ecology.
Other ports in the American West, East, and South have their own lists and vital roles to play, but LA’s Master Queuing List holds a unique place in the trade and transportation continuum because so much of what Americans buy and sell comes from the Pacific Rim, and the twin ports ringing San Pedro harbor are Asia’s leading point of entry.
A third of U.S.-bound consumer goods, and far higher percentages of some, pass by the Marine Exchange. That makes Angels Gate and Debbie Chavez the one essential stop for everyone’s commute—long before you even leave the house.
The complex ballet required to move a product, any product, from door to door—and the overload that affects and infects that dance—begins most often at a port. In the U.S., the leaders for containerized goods are the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the Port of New York/Newark, and Savannah, Georgia, followed by Seattle, Virginia, Houston, and Oakland. Their history is the story of transportation overload in microcosm, particularly the Port of Los Angeles, which has become both a cause of system-wide overload and one of its greatest victims.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the first cargo ships sailing for San Pedro Harbor on the south side of LA had two options. Their captains could throw up their hands and bypass Los Angeles entirely in favor of the then thriving, now vanished port of Anaheim Landing to the south. Or they could anchor outside the mudflats of San Pedro, unload goods onto small boats, and then row them ashore to waiting horse-drawn wagons. Exports could repeat the process in reverse. It was not a delightful way of doing business.
As soon as the village of Los Angeles showed the least inclination to grow, the inefficiencies and limitations of this infrastructure-free method became intolerable and the demand for more capacity irresistible. Small piers were built in the natural harbor beneath the Palos Verdes Peninsula. This induced a few more ships to come calling on San Pedro with bigger loads, and soon larger piers had to be constructed. Commerce grew further, as did the opportunity for profit, which is when the enterprising Delaware native who founded the new California port town of Wilmington, Phineas Banning, began the first of many efforts to dredge harbor channels to accommodate even larger ships seeking to do business in LA. This is when Banning also began laying plans, then rails, to link the port with downtown by train.
Soon the demands of commerce in a rapidly growing city overloaded those accommodations, too, and the simple piers evolved into massive wooden wharves built with a graceful curve so the longest portion of the docks paralleled the coastline, enabling far longer piers with more berths without jutting far into the shipping lanes. Then, when the cargo moving across those extended wharves became too heavy to move by hand or horse, train tracks were laid on the piers, with steam engines pulling boxcars laden with goods and grains to and from the loading zones. Those mechanized wharves drew even more ships, creating a shortage of protected warehouse space, yet another problem of overload to solve. In 1917, the prospering city responded by building Municipal Warehouse No. 1, a six-story concrete behemoth, then the largest warehouse west of Chicago and the most visible seaside structure on the West Coast for many years. Approaching ships could navigate by sighting that tall squarish building before anything else at the port was visible. It quickly became a center of activity and commerce in California, an object of fascination for its size and the port’s engine of growth for decades, a pinnacle of induced demand.
Three thousand piles were driven into the bedrock for Municipal Warehouse No. 1’s foundation in order to support the 27,000 cubic yards of cement and 1,200 tons of reinforcing steel. The three-and-a-half-foot-thick walls yielded a building with a controlled climate year-round without air-conditioning. The warehouse cost $475,000 ($9.5 million in 2014 dollars) to build, with twelve acres of storage space and sixteen electric hoists serving those six floors. The ground floor boasted the killer feature: multiple rail lines running through the center in a recessed bed with concrete platforms on either side—a subway station for freight, with room for twenty-four boxcars unloaded entirely inside the warehouse.
For most of the twentieth century, Municipal Warehouse No. 1 served as the only bonded warehouse at the port, the landmark where everything from gold bullion to circus elephants to the rail coach that carried Winston Churchill to his grave ended up after arriving at the port. In the 1950s, the interior of this singular warehouse was designated as its own foreign trade zone for duty-free imports and re-exports, which made stepping inside the building the legal equivalent of leaving the country.
More than any other facility at the port, this warehouse and its unrivaled capacity put Los Angeles on the map as a center for global trade, relieving overload for years while accommodating a growing port and a growing city. Only the rise of containerization put an end to Municipal Warehouse No. 1’s dominant role in cargo commerce on the West Coast, and although its retro-cool interior is used to this day for storage, its most prized role now is as a convenient set for Hollywood filmmakers. The ground-floor railroad tracks and concrete platforms are fairly easily dressed up as a convincing New York City subway station, close enough to every major Hollywood studio to limit crew costs to day rates, no overnights required. (The port is regularly used for various film backgrounds; the Mediterranean-style hacienda and palm tree–studded grounds of the Coast Guard commander’s house on Terminal Island is another favorite, figuring prominently in a number of movies, including standing in for Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in A Few Good Men.)
Even after the rise of open-air container yards over bulk warehouses, the giant building’s height kept it in use for many more years to meet another sort of rising demand at the port: the demand for information. The warehouse’s high roof and vantage served as the first and most enduring home for the Marine Exchange and its all-important Master Queuing List.
This critical starting point in the goods-movement system evolved with the same pattern of demand and overload as every other major component in the door-to-door world. In the early 1900s, messenger boys were posted on hilltops overlooking the port, where they could watch out for approaching cargo ships. They’d try to identify incoming ships by the names marked on their hulls or, failing that, by the rigging of sailing vessels or by markings on the smokestacks of steamships. Once a ship was spotted and at least tentatively identified, the runners would then race back to the shipping agents who employed them, who then would compete with one another to dispatch pilots, tugboat captains, and stevedores to meet the new arrival. Running boys were soon augmented with men on horseback to speed the process.
By 1920 the inefficiency of having dozens of runners and riders racing (and sabotaging) one another on the hilltops near the port, then showing up at the office mere moments before a ship arrived, became untenable. A shipping agent and local customhouse broker came up with the solution when he founded the precursor of the modern Marine Exchange, which he called the Maritime Exchange and Sailing Club. W. H. Wickersham got permission to station lookouts atop the best dockside vantage point available, the roof of Municipal Warehouse No. 1, closer and better than any hilltop. His spotters, all experienced mariners—many of them retired Navy and Coast Guard signalmen—had telescopes on the rooftop to spot the incoming vessels. Once they made a sighting, they had flags and semaphore lights for communicating with the ship crews, and megaphones to shout the information down to coworkers on the ground, who would spread the word to all the port players onshore to prepare for a new arrival. As the ships passed close by, the lookouts would shout berth instructions through the megaphones to the crew.
The enterprising Wickersham supplied the arrival information to the maritime industry for a fee, and although his service proved popular, his dream of finding fortune in the lookout business fell short. After two years of no profit, he decided to shut down his rooftop crow’s nest, but was persuaded instead to turn the business over to the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. The chamber would subsidize the operation because of its obvious benefits to the business community and the local economy.1 Renamed the Marine Exchange of Los Angeles and freed from the pressure of turning a profit, the service became a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week operation. Onshore communications were switched from megaphones to telephones, with the tower lookouts relaying their information to a central office, which then assembled a daily report of the LA shipping news. The exchange posted the information in the building lobby in San Pedro, but the real breakthrough came when the staffers started relaying the report by phone to subscribers in real time. Soon hundreds of calls a day deluged the office, requiring five separate phone lines to handle all the information requests from paying customers across the city, then beyond.
When the new managers of the exchange figured out that there was a hunger for more data in the industry beyond just the current day’s arrivals, they started collecting detailed information on all the ships that ever called at the port, then expanded the service to include a daily report that listed all the arrivals and departures expected for the next three days. When clients demanded even more, the report was expanded to look five days into the future, giving shippers, importers, exporters, and cargo owners unprecedented knowledge of their goods and supply chain. Each day the projections would be updated in case of changes, delays, or early arrivals. At the time, no other U.S. port had anything quite like this, and demand for this advanced planning tool went global. The Marine Exchange soon became financially self-sufficient. The little shack atop the warehouse was replaced with a proper watch tower that offered full amenities for the around-the-clock crew, with an expanded mission to serve the Port of Long Beach as well as Los Angeles.
The Marine Exchange remained essentially unchanged from this 1920s model until the 1990s, serving as a critical information gateway for goods leaving and entering the country. Steamship lines, harbor stevedores, trucking companies, railroads, and the ports themselves depended on that perch atop the warehouse, using its data and predictions to dispatch thousands of workers and vehicles every day, plotting the course of cans of tuna from Thailand, shoes from China, coffee from Colombia. All this information was stored in-house: decades of shipping data going back to 1923, with active shippers and vessels summarized on note cards coded with different colors representing various types of ships: tankers, bulk cargo, fishing craft, and passenger liners. Later, new categories and colors had to be added for container vessels and specialized car carriers. Radar and radio links to ships came online in the fifties and sixties, followed by identifying transponders similar to those used on aircraft. The cards representing a day’s vessel traffic in Los Angeles and Long Beach were displayed on a rotating barrel-sized drum that allowed the marine information specialists to single out and update at a glance hundreds of daily shipping movements in the channels, anchorages, berths, and servicing docks. In an analog, pre-Internet age, the homemade spinning barrel and the decks of cards served as a sort of mechanical computer. (It was such an ingenious system that, when it finally gave way to a computer-based version, the Marine Exchange custom software began as a virtual representation of the old analog system, right down to the color coding of the cards.)
For all its ingenuity and value, however, the Marine Exchange suffered from one missing piece that affected capacity, safety, and order at the port. The exchange lacked the authority to use its wealth of time-sensitive information to act as a marine version of air traffic control, even though the increasing business of the port created a pressing need for such a service. The Southern California shipping lanes, filled with ever larger and more powerful ships, had by the late seventies and early eighties experienced escalating numbers of accidents and many more near misses—up to two hundred a month. As the trans-Asian cargo traffic multiplied and container ships began to increase in number and grow in size, the waters near the ports became a treacherous free-for-all zone. Incoming cargo vessels and tankers would spot other ships approaching and race to the harbor breakwater, directing their own courses, cutting across rival ships, trying to be first to slip inside the opening in the protective stone barrier. The port’s first-come, first-served system then in place, and the overload that occurred when there were more ships than berths available, made conflicts and dangerous games of maritime chicken inevitable.
Coast Guard veteran Reid Crispino, who would join the staff at the Marine Exchange after leaving the service, recalls his reaction the first time he saw those old-school, free-for-all lines of ships jockeying to get in first. “This is crazy,” he told a colleague. “But nothing’s going to change until something terrible happens.”
Something terrible did happen, though in Alaska, not Los Angeles. A tanker ship laden with Alaskan crude and bound for the Port of Long Beach struck a coastal reef in March 1989, rupturing the hull and spilling as many as 38 million gallons of oil into pristine fisheries and habitats. The running aground of the Exxon Valdez marked one of the worst environmental disasters ever in U.S. waters—and one of the most preventable, given that the outcropping the ship rammed was well-known to mariners and charted. One of the many lessons learned from the multiple human and system failures that contributed to this disaster was that a land-based, radar-driven vessel traffic service for directing ships safely near ports and coastal areas could have easily detected the ship’s errant course and prevented the spill. The absence of such systems at all but a tiny handful of ports became a national scandal, and bringing them online became a national priority. By 1994 the Marine Exchange, newly charged with a vessel traffic control mission in partnership with the Coast Guard, moved to its current site atop Angels Gate, far from the signal clutter that made the old warehouse roof a poor spot for modern radar dishes.
Debbie Chavez joined the exchange during this transition time. Charged with helping with the switch from the old cards-on-a-barrel system to modern computers, she eventually became head of the entire marine information service division at the exchange. The modernization (and Chavez’s career) paralleled the emergence of the Los Angeles–Long Beach port complex as the leading gateway for America’s consumer economy—the place where the door-to-door dance is at its most complex, and where overload is now a daily reality, although in ways no one could have imagined back in 1994.
On February 13, 2015, the maritime information manager arrives at Angels Gate in the gray light of early morning. Fingers of wispy mist stretch out over the waters below the Marine Exchange, enough for her to feel the gloom and winter chill, but too thin to conceal the long line of waiting ships. The cargo vessels stacked high with Lego-colored containers stretch down the coast as far as she can see, a twenty-mile-long queue of goods and food and fuel and delay. The line will only grow longer this day, she knows. But the goods-movement ballet has to go on, and it starts this day, as usual, with Debbie Chavez, her five marine information specialists, and their phones. It’s time to crank up the Boiler Room.
That’s what they call it during those busy morning hours after dawn in Chavez’s warren of offices staffed by men and women with phones glued to their ears. Tucked out of sight from the breathtaking panoramic views that dominate the traffic control room, the information service’s resemblance to a telemarketing sweatshop or election phone-bank boiler room at these times is obvious. And boiling it is, as port congestion has never been worse than this month’s backlog. It had been bad at many ports around the country lately, but murderous on the West Coast, where the longshoremen’s union has been working without a contract for nearly a year, unable to come to terms with the shipping lines. The shippers, truckers, and union workers pointed fingers at one another for causing the ocean traffic jam. Although the Marine Exchange is neutral—the Switzerland of the seafaring world, as executive director Captain J. Kip Louttit, likes to say—the rancor had rendered Chavez’s job all the harder. All her contacts were on edge.
She settles behind the computer monitors at her desk and tackles the first task: pinning down the expected arrivals, verifying that they are on schedule as predicted the day before. Chavez looks over the list and begins making her calls, starting with the nation’s oldest and largest shipping agent, Norton Lilly International, which keeps an office in Long Beach, close to the conjoined ports and their clients. Norton represents owners of four of the five expected arrivals this day, including one of the biggest ships calling on the port complex, the MSC Flavia, a Mediterranean Shipping Company vessel capable of carrying 6,200 standard forty-foot containers.2 Today it carries a mix of clothing, electronics, shoes, and a panoply of other goods from Europe and Asia bound for Target, Macy’s, Kohl’s, and thousands of other businesses near and far. Many steps remain in the ballet before any goods reach their ultimate recipients, the BCOs (beneficial cargo owners) in shipping parlance. The congestion delays have them all anxious, angry, and wondering if they should instead have shipped via some other port—or some other method, such as air freight.
The Flavia has just arrived in the vicinity and is working its way to an anchorage outside the Port of Los Angeles, where it will, like almost every other ship, have to wait for a berth. Chavez and her staff soon verify that four other container vessels have arrived early in the morning, two for Long Beach, one more for LA, all three assigned to “waiting-room” anchorages outside the ports proper. A fifth container vessel has arrived but its anchorage and port of call remain undetermined, as it carries freight for both LA and Long Beach, a complication of the new alliances among shippers that contributes to overload. Eight more ships are expected to arrive today, Chavez and her staff verify, but they are still at sea, hovering outside the two-hundred-mile limit and its pollution regulations, so they can continue to burn their cheapest, dirtiest fuel. This also keeps them far outside the twenty-five-mile coastal zone in which they must contact and accept direction from the Marine Exchange traffic controllers.
Next Chavez has to verify the day’s “shifts.” These are the ships moving between remote anchorages and berths inside the port terminals for loading and unloading. Only two vessels will be making it to berths today, neither of them container ships. Three others will be shifting to anchorages while they await spots at one of the thirteen massive container terminals at the two ports.
Chavez passes all this new information on to the traffic controllers stationed in the Watch, whose computer-rendered images of the ports begin to pulse with alerts about the pending moves. This system is a dramatic improvement compared to the analog days, when Chavez would walk over to a window dividing her operation from the Watch and write the updates on the glass with a grease pencil. She had to write backwards, so the controllers could read it from their side.
The updated arrival information next goes out to the port pilots so they can use it to plan their staffing, and to all the other Marine Exchange subscribers up and down the supply chain. Then Chavez moves on to the rest of the day’s and week’s ship movements so that the advance reports can be updated and all the many players at the port, from terminals to longshoremen to pilots to crane operators to rail and truck haulers, can plan the days ahead, staffing the right number of people, preparing the right number of freight cars and trailer chassis, assemble the right number of gangs to unload the ships, to fuel them, to supply the vessels with food, water, and equipment. So much depends on Chavez’s reports, but congestion at the ports is taking its toll, the worst delays and backlog she’s seen in twenty-one years. That’s how long it’s been since this working mom born, raised, and still living in her hometown of Carson, California, left her bank teller job to dive into the world of port traffic.
The shipping snapshot she and her team crafted for February 13 reveals the depth of the overload:
• Pending arrivals: a total of thirteen ships are expected to arrive on Friday the thirteenth, with five more expected on Saturday, ten on Sunday, and thirteen on Monday. Of those vessels, twenty-three are container ships. The rest are tankers, bulk cargo vessels, and passenger cruise ships. Just over a week out, a total of 108 ships are expected to arrive.
• Pending shifts: fifteen vessels are supposed to move between anchorage and berth from Friday through Monday.
• Pending departures: thirty-seven vessels are supposed to leave the twin ports between Friday and Monday, fourteen of them container vessels.
• Total number of vessels at port: ninety-two ships overall are present, fifty-nine of them berthed at terminals. Of those waiting to get into a berth for unloading, loading, or both, twenty-seven of them are backed up due to port congestion (the other six are awaiting supplies, fuel, or repairs).
One of the twenty-seven ships stalled by overload, the 4,000-ton container ship MSC Charleston has been waiting three weeks at anchor. Another ten of the ships delayed by congestion have been waiting ten days or more. The largest ship in either port, the COSCO Denmark, carrying 7,000 containers, began day five of its wait for a berth in Long Beach this day. In all, 19 container ships with a combined capacity of more than 80,000 containers are stalled in congested anchorages along with six break-bulk vessels and two general cargo ships carrying such items as fabricated steel girders, earthmovers, bulldozers, and aircraft components too large for containers. Those stalled ships hold billions of dollars’ worth of cargo, all of it either late for delivery or soon to be overdue. Businesses with short time frames—candy, toy, and the gift businesses awaiting goods for Valentine’s Day—are losing millions. Sale items already advertised are not on department store shelves. Now the springtime–Easter holiday products that should have already arrived are missing in action, too.
A year earlier, cargo ships faced little or no wait for a berth, and the turnaround—the time it takes to reach a terminal, unload, reload, and depart—was a point of pride for both ports as well as a source of competitive advantage. At that time, ships averaged less than three days in port, with small ships moving out sooner than that, and larger ones taking longer. Now Friday the thirteenth has doubled turnaround times for some shipping lines, and tripled or quadrupled those times for others.
Part of this arose from the long-standing labor dispute at the port and bickering over contract terms that had led to alleged slowdowns by workers and lockouts by shippers. Everyone from the White House down to the mayors of the two port cities have expressed growing frustration at the seemingly endless feud with such potentially dire consequences for the economy. Yet the high-stakes contract argument did not erupt over such straightforward points as money or automation. Instead the battle began over the more arcane question of whether the arbitrator who settles disputes between labor and management should be appointed for life or have a fixed term. (The shipping lines, who like the current arbitrator, want him to stay in place forever; the union, not so much.) But the long-term problem of congestion has more behind it than the lack of a longshoreman’s contract. Bigger ships hauling more cargo have been taxing port operations and the trucking industry for years with the sheer bulk of shipments flooding the docks when big ships arrive in clusters. And the new trend of shipping alliances has made handling the larger loads on each ship more complex, as it has required some ships to stop at multiple terminals.
Another major factor has been the trucking foul-ups caused when shipping lines unilaterally decided to stop a decades-old practice of supplying the wheeled chassis that turn containers into semitrailers. The decision saved the shipping lines money but created havoc as the ports and freight-hauling companies struggled to set up alternatives—no easy matter when the majority of the trucks servicing the port are small owner-operated businesses working on contract. For much of 2014 and 2015, chassis shortages drove the port truckers away, imposing onerous delays on those who remained as hundreds of thousands of containers piled up in dockside mountains, undelivered. Truckers who once simply arrived at the port, picked up a container and chassis combo, then left suddenly and had to make multiple stops, first to find a chassis, then to pick up a container somewhere else at the port, and then wend their way back to the exit. Predictably, this created in-port traffic jams, unproductive down time, and a chain reaction of delayed cargo. This sort of congestion and overload at ports is a nationwide phenomenon, not just a Los Angeles thing. New York/New Jersey, Oakland, Virginia, and others have been hit hard, too, as well as the intermodal rail terminals in the Midwest that handle the goods moving to and from the coasts. Trucks sitting and waiting to pick up and deliver containers contribute to excess air pollution and carbon emissions, and impose huge costs on the consumer economy: $348 million wasted a year, a figure that includes nine million gallons in wasted diesel fuel and fifteen million hours of wasted worker time.3
Settling the labor dispute with a new contract would provide short-term relief, but would not address any of these other overload threats.
“Our position is that we’re the honest broker. We take no sides on any of this,” Chavez says, looking over the long list of ships parked, knowing that every extra day in port costs money and jobs up and down the chain. “But it’s not taking sides to state the obvious: this is a mess. Everybody loses.”
Up in the Watch, gesturing at the long line of ships snaking south down the coast, general manager Reid Crispino says, “See for yourself. It goes all the way down to Huntington Beach.”
Oustide the picture window, the twenty-mile-long line of waiting ships stretches as far as the eye—or the telescope—can see. It vanishes into the distance.
Crispino falls quiet a moment as a colleague speaks softly into a radio microphone, confirming a container ship’s position in the distant contingency anchorages. On the large multicolor computer display, which combines radar, GPS, and transponder signals from the ships with a map overlay of the ports, the dot representing the ship on the radio seems to be floating inside a force-field bubble. The screen image represents the circular buffer zone that each cargo ship in the anchorages is supposed to maintain to avoid collisions. That bubble is 1,200 yards—more than a half mile—in diameter. No other ship may enter that circle. However, it’s the Marine Exchange’s vigilance, not force fields, that keeps ships separated in congested waters. This is a necessary protection given that these massive vessels are surprisingly fast but not very agile. Collisions are almost unheard-of and near misses are a fraction of what they were in the eighties, Crispino says. “If any good came out of the Exxon Valdez, you’re seeing it on that screen.”
Crispino, like so many others working at the port, has been a lifelong mariner. He grew up in Anaheim, California, a few miles from Disneyland, but his landlocked home only heightened his attraction to the sea. He learned to sail before he could drive, navigated solo to Catalina Island thirty miles offshore when he was thirteen years old, and joined the Coast Guard at age seventeen. In the service, he worked fishery patrols in Alaska, was engaged in the search-and-rescue branch in California for eight years, returned to Alaska to help with the Valdez oil spill cleanup, and retired after more than twenty years of service. He joined the Marine Exchange in 1997, happy for a more stable home and work life at this center of the shipping universe and consumer economy. Still, he admits that, like almost all the veteran mariners here, he still misses the exotic travel, the feel of a deck underfoot, the spray in his face. Then he thinks how miserable those crews must be trapped out in those anchorages, and working with a computer display of ships rather than the real thing doesn’t seem so bad after all.
The radio squawks again. It has been a slow day—congestion means less to do on the Watch, not more—but it is time for a shift. Berth and course information are exchanged and confirmed by radio, and the traffic controller calls the pilot’s office over at Long Beach.
“At least someone’s going to unload today,” Crispino says as the ship in its bubble begins to move across his screen.