The little pilot boat bounces and slaps the waves as it sidles next to the towering cargo vessel as they match speed and course, the little boat looking hopelessly fragile next to its eight-story, windowless counterpart—an egg challenging China’s Great Wall.
The cargo vessel Wisdom Ace looks more like a floating building than a ship, which makes sense: it is, in effect, a floating parking garage, a very specialized sort of cargo ship known as a RO-RO (for “roll-on, roll-off”). It’s a car carrier, and the beauty of this type of vessel is that the cargo can be driven on and off rather than craned into place like containers. Today the Wisdom Ace carries 5,000 Mercedes cars and SUVs from Germany, parked and lashed bumper to bumper on the ship’s many low-roofed decks. The Jacobsen Pilot Service boat is there to deliver a pilot, whose job is to bring the big ship and its costly cargo safely in to dock.
The Jacobsen boat steers close enough to count the rivets in the big ship’s looming expanse of steel plating; close enough to lean out and touch the rivets.
A third of the way up the featureless expanse of the Wisdom Ace’s hull—which is long and wide enough to cover two football fields—a door opens out to nowhere about twenty feet above the roiling water. This is the pilot’s door. A rope ladder is dangled from it, and two men peer down, one of them waving.
“That’s my cue.” Bob Blair stands up and stretches. He had been resting in the sun-drenched stern of the boat, maybe even dozing. It seems mariners can sleep through chop and wind and the approach of floating parking structures, no problem. He had been up since three that morning, after all, and this would be the third ship he piloted this day through the Port of Long Beach’s narrow and quirky channels, which feature a bridge so old it must wear a diaper to catch falling bricks, and submerged obstructions with such ominous nicknames as “the Can Opener.” Blair, like his fellow pilots, knows all these idiosyncrasies, dangers, twists, and tight spaces as no visiting helmsman could. It’s his job to find the safest course to bring the cargo across the last few watery miles of a global crossing.
The sandy-haired man with the blue dress shirt, necktie, and immaculate black windbreaker steps up to the portside gunwale of his boat, adjusts the zipper on his jacket, and then leans out over the whitecaps. Without breaking stride, Blair grabs the rope ladder and steps up onto its nearest rung, a single fluid, casual motion, as if he were stepping from street to curb rather than leaping onto a steel-walled monster that could kill him in an instant if he slipped. He nimbly scales the ladder and disappears through the door as the pilot boat peels off, dodging the frothing wake kicked out from the big car carrier.
Less than forty-five minutes later, Blair eases the Wisdom Ace through the port and into its berth at Pier F so the stevedore gang can begin unleashing the cars, driving them down the ramp and off to a holding area. Luxury cars and SUVs stream off the ship like spectators leaving the ballpark after a game.
It is almost 11:00 a.m. by now, and Blair awaits word on his next assignment: piloting a container ship out of China to the backlog anchorage.
“Every port is different,” Blair observes. “These ships call all over the world. There’s no way their crews can know how to get in and out of each and every port. There would be slowdowns or accidents all the time. The ports require pilots because we know our ports. We cut the risk. I wouldn’t say we’re treated like royalty when we board a ship, but they’re usually glad to see us.”
Port pilots are among the elite of the shipping world, part of its hidden choreography, essential but unheralded professionals who keep the cargo moving through its tightest, most congested spots. They board the ships as they arrive and take them to their berths, then guide them back to the anchorages when they depart. Tugboats assist with the large ships, teams of them on windy days, as the immense cargo vessels act like sails because they present such a large surface for wind to act upon. A 15-knot breeze can generate one hundred tons of force on a container ship, enough to blow it sideways or cause its tail to swing around. Tugs have to exert that much pressure on the downwind side to counteract that force—it would take two or three to match that 15-knot breeze—all under the direction of the pilot. Pilots never touch a control but stand on the bridge and instruct the crew on speed, course, and turns. Blair says there is often a language barrier, but the simple commands are known by all in any language, and he usually makes his meaning clear. It is a formal and ritualistic process at times, the welcome sometimes lavish, with offers of food and beverages, and at other times it’s more tense and wary. But the pilot’s word is always final while in the port waters.
By way of comparison, port pilots are the surgeons who swoop into town to perform some complex, difficult procedure on a patient whose regular crew of caregivers does all the prep work and aftercare. Or perhaps the pilot’s role is best likened to the short relief pitcher in baseball, brought in to record that last out or two with everything on the line. It’s stressful but over quick, the end of an ocean journey that lasts weeks on the open water, but where the risk is rarely greater than when the ship is a handful of miles from port. The pilots are the closers of the door-to-door world, a breed apart, with coveted jobs that pay some of the highest salaries in the marine business. Certainly the compensation is comparable to surgeons and professional ballplayers, ranging from about $300,000 to nearly half a million dollars a year.
Most are career mariners. Blair came up as a tugboat pilot, those essential helpers when maneuvering big ships through narrow port channels. He eventually applied for a pilot’s job at Jacobsen, which tests its applicants mercilessly and, given the rewards, can afford to be choosy. He’s been there eleven years, which ranks him among the least senior of the pilots. Jacobsen is a destination job in the port piloting field, and it’s run like a family business despite taking part in 7,000 ship moves a year: everything in Long Beach, plus the U.S. Navy ships moving in and out of the nearby Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach, plus the small number of American-flagged vessels calling at the Port of Los Angeles, mostly oil tankers.
Jacobsen is a unique presence in the port pilot business, a private company where the seventeen pilots have ownership interest, compared to most other operations, where the pilots work in a union shop or are municipal employees, as in the Port of Los Angeles. Jacobsen has held the piloting contract in Long Beach since 1922, when the company was founded by an immigrant Norwegian fisherman, and it has been run by three successive generations of Jacobsens ever since. Blair’s boss, Captain John Strong, head pilot and vice president at Jacobsen, has been a pilot for thirty-two years and a mariner even longer, serving on research vessels out of San Diego (where he worked for the man who discovered the wreck of the Titanic), supply ships out of Tahiti and the Virgin Islands, and oil tankers in the Gulf of Mexico. He has always loved to be at sea—a compulsion, he says, fueled by a restlessness that inevitably seized him if he stayed land-bound too many months. Through his wanderings he found three wives and lost two of them, felt the pain of coming home to kids who did not recognize him, and then found that the pilot’s life could be the best of both worlds. A pilot can be on the water all day and yet home for supper every night, which meant his third marriage has stuck now for twenty-two years and counting.
“I’m the kind of guy who has to be at sea and who has to be married,” he says. “So this has worked out well for me.”
Of his job, he says it often boils down to this: “We are the only ones who can tell a ship’s captain: No.”
The pilot’s job has grown more complicated during his career, first due to the containerization revolution, and most recently because of the trend toward ever-larger mega-ships. Now the ships are so big that when the pilots sail up the channel to the Long Beach inner harbor, they cannot even see the water or how close the ship is to the banks. The clearance in the tight spots could be as little as fifty feet on either side of the bigger ships, which, by comparison, would be like driving a car for miles with less than two feet of clearance on either side. (Drivers are accustomed to much more clearance than that: typical freeway lanes are twelve feet wide, twice the width of the average car, so that on a two-lane highway there’s usually about six feet of separation side to side between vehicles.) With clearance proportional to the tight inner channels of the Port of Long Beach, a twitch of the wheel would crash the car—or the container ship—into a wall.
Technology has come to the aid of the pilots, while the job remains a curious mixture of primitive and advanced. The rope ladders are right out of the Mutiny on the Bounty days, but Bob Blair also packs a state-of-the-art wireless GPS tablet with live feeds of port conditions, traffic, tides, winds, and depth in order to navigate those tight blind spots without incident.
The inner harbor presents particularly tight quarters with very busy port terminals inside. Ships headed there pass beneath the aged Gerald Desmond Bridge, which links the harbor to the critical-goods corridor of the 710 Freeway. This is the bridge with the diaper: nets underneath have hung there for years to catch crumbling concrete that has been raining down from the bridge as the structure slowly disintegrates from heavy use. The port officials estimate that 15 percent of U.S. consumer goods cross that bridge every day, although it is too fragile and too low at 155 feet for modern cargo ships. Radar and radio antennae have to be retracted on the tallest vessels, navigation masts folded, flags lowered. The quarters are so tight that, during the passage of one monster cargo ship stacked high with containers on deck, Strong actually had to stop the vessel and clamber atop the containers with a yardstick in hand to make sure the ship could pass beneath the bridge safely. It did, with inches to spare—at low tide.
A $1.5 billion replacement bridge with more lanes, bike and pedestrian ways, and a 205-foot clearance to accommodate larger ships was expected to open by 2018—over budget and two years late.
The inner harbor area has another bottleneck near a power plant, where a water intake valve extends into the channel. This is the spot the pilots call “the Can Opener” because it could puncture a ship’s hull and rip it open like a tin can if not avoided. It’s slated to be removed eventually to create more leeway for the big ships.
“Every trip is different,” Strong tells his pilots. “Different ship. Different crew. The weather changes. You can have the best voyage plan in the world, but you have to go in with no assumptions. Because I guarantee things will change. And you’ll have to respond.”
When the pilot’s job is done, the cargo still lingers at the port—too long for anyone’s liking during times of congestion and overload—but it stops being ocean freight at that point and becomes land freight. And it is here that the ingenious design of the modern container ship—as opposed to the age-old design of bulk cruisers with traditional holds, ramps, and hoists—comes into play.
The old way—dating back three thousand years to the ancient Phoenician traders with their monopoly on precious royal purple dye, and continuing right into the post–World War II era—was to unload a ship as a moving company would empty a house. Stevedores would manually carry out furniture, boxes, and sacks, loading them on—depending on the era and place—trucks or boxcars, horse carts or camel caravans. The modern way is like a factory assembly line, all huge machines and rapid repetition, enabled by the complementary symmetry of container ship and shipping container. They’re all standardized. And so every move to load or unload is the same. This makes for a mechanized dockside world that is fast and fearful and dangerous—and, aside from contract disputes and other hitches and obstacles, incredibly efficient. Humans need not enter the cargo hold of a container ship. Indeed, it can be perilous for them to do so, and while containers are being unloaded, only a slip and a fall will put a human body in the mix, never with good results. In 2014, a dockworker tumbled through a gap in containers aboard a small Panamanian freighter at the port, seriously injuring his legs and back. There have been deaths at world ports from similar mishaps.
The ship’s design enables this hands-free efficiency. A modern container ship is built in sections called cells, which is why such a vessel is also called a cellular ship—not because of its wireless capabilities, but because it is assembled like a cross section in reverse. Imagine taking a passenger car and, beginning with the front end, slicing it from hood ornament to ground level, then carving one after another vertical section, each about a foot wide. On the gargantuan scale of container ships, these are the sorts of sectional building blocks that are crafted separately, complete with all the internals—conduits and corridors, plumbing and wiring, support beams and hatches. At the shipyard, these cells are then placed together, their components connected and the metal structures bolted and welded into whole ships. And the secret sauce inside the vast hollow interiors of these ships, built into every cell before they are assembled, is the system of container guide channels: vertical rails that become part of a ship’s superstructure and sized exactly for standard forty-foot shipping containers. The rails guide the big metal boxes into place in orderly, tight-packed, and secure rows right down to the deepest level of a vessel, so cans don’t have to be painstakingly positioned. They are just lowered, slid, and locked into place.
This simple, ingenious design allows not only for rapid-fire loading and unloading but also meticulous cargo planning. Each container’s place on a ship is identified by three map coordinates: the vertical row, measured from number one at the bow of the ship, increasing toward the aft; the horizontal tier, with number one starting at the bottom layer of containers and moving up in number toward the top of the stack; and the slot, which measures container position from side to side, with even numbers on the port side and odd numbers starboard. Even with 6,000 containers on board, the position of every piece of containerized cargo is known (although the mega-shipping alliances have undermined the efficiency of this system by jumbling together cargo from different shipping lines).
Once unloaded, each of the 22 million intermodal containers in the world can be identified by their internationally standardized reporting mark, and by embedded radio-frequency identification (RFID) transmitters. The identity of each container is supposed to be verified multiple times by the stevedore gangs so nothing gets lost in the vast and confusing topography of millions of stacked containers in yards and terminals at the port.
None of this would work if the number one design principle of the modern container ship was not ease of unloading. Fuel efficiency, power, safety, comfort, emissions—all are important concerns to the shipping lines—but if the containers can’t flow off a ship with ease and speed, the vessel is worse than worthless. It becomes a money pit.
America does not build such ships: Japan and South Korea lead the world on the creation of ever larger container ships. Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering in Korea, one of the top five shipbuilders in the world, has 46,000 workers building 100 ships and oil platforms at any one time, including one of the world’s largest cargo ships, the Maersk Triple E. (The three E’s represent economy of scale, energy efficiency, and environmental performance.) This model of ship is 1,312 feet long and 194 feet wide, with the capacity to carry 9,000 cargo containers per trip. So far they serve only Asia and Europe, as they are much too big for even the newly expanded Panama Canal locks or any North American port. Some of the berths in Los Angeles and Long Beach could dock them, but not unload them: they lack cranes with enough reach.
These mega-ships require only fifteen crew members to sail across the world, and cost $190 million apiece. Maersk ordered twenty. Daewoo has the capacity to build twelve simultaneously.
Once a container ship makes it out of the waiting room anchorages and reaches a container terminal, the unloading becomes another exercise in multi-ton surgery. Mammoth cranes capable of spanning the 170-foot-wide ships are positioned up and down the length of a vessel to begin the extraction of the containers. There are 140 electrically powered ship-to-shore cranes at the twin ports, a distinctive sight on the skyline, particularly when they’re idle and the boom arms are pointed skyward, like soldiers firing a twenty-one-gun salute. The bright red and blue crane towers run three hundred feet high and will soon be taller. The ports are painstakingly raising them sixty feet by giving them longer legs to accommodate larger, taller container ships, at a cost of a million dollars apiece (versus $10 million for each new crane). Almost all are imported from China; America makes neither the ships nor the equipment for unloading them, and they have to be transported already assembled on specialized cargo ships.
The crane operators say their job is among the best at the port, if also one of the most stressful. It’s also one of the most financially rewarding, as the most skilled crane operators can earn nearly as much as the port pilots. “It’s technical, it’s exciting, it’s rewarding, and it’s important,” a hard-hatted crane jockey shouted over the din of her machine as she stepped into the elevator that lifted her three hundred feet up to a catwalk leading to the operator’s cabin. “I love it.”
The crane cabin rides on a trolley that lets it slide back and forth on the high horizontal boom that stretches over the width of a container ship. Metal cables spool up and down beneath the crane operator’s feet, from which the “spreader” is suspended. The spreader takes the place of the old-school hooks that dangled from the cranes of the past. It attaches to the fittings atop the containers, with expanding metal grips that lock firmly into place and then retract after a “can” is lowered to the pier surface. The operator directs the cabin out over the ship while sitting in a moving armchair surprisingly reminiscent of Captain Kirk’s command position on the original Star Trek, buttons and switches beside each hand. The operator grips in each hand a joystick used to lower and raise the spreader until it’s lined up properly with the container top. Wind and the ship’s roll in the water add to the challenge, and the complexity of the task has so far kept humans in the loop rather than robots, although a couple of terminals are beginning to use automated cranes and vehicles to move containers after they come off the ships. Most of the time the operator is staring downward between his or her feet through a window in the cabin floor, watching intently as the spreader drops into position.
Red and amber lights give way to green when the spreader is properly gripping a container, and the operator quickly lifts the can. There’s nothing slow or deliberate at this point: the move is a sprint, not a jog, even though the object being lifted could easily weigh ten tons or more. The cabin rides back, away from the ship and into position over an empty trailer chassis, where the operator lowers and drops the can. As soon as the container is settled, the crane detaches and immediately zips back for the next container while the newly laden truck leaves and the next empty chassis is driven into position.
Crane operators at the California ports can average between twenty-five and twenty-eight containers an hour—just over two a minute. The highest paid and most sought-after operators routinely handle more than thirty cans an hour and can earn $250,000 a year with a thirty-hour workweek. They move more cargo in two minutes than the old bulk cargo stevedores could unload in an hour. And yet, even with four cranes working the bigger ships at once, and all operating at peak speeds, a 6,000-container delivery takes 54 hours to unload entirely, not counting time to reload (even when many of the outgoing containers from American ports tend to be empties).
During the labor-management dispute at the ports in late 2014 and early 2015, the crane work slowed dramatically, contributing to congestion by lengthening the time it took to unload each ship. When the contract was finally settled, it took nearly three months to work through the backlog. And yet the problem of congestion remained, for the bigger ships have a longer-lasting effect on system overload than labor unrest: more containers on each ship mean more hours to unload.
When the crane operator’s work is done, the terminal gangs of longshoremen take over, moving the cans into temporary holding areas, where towers and pyramids of the different-colored containers amass until the proper truck or train is ready to be loaded. Marine clerks sort through the mazes of containers, some of which are difficult to find because of malfunctioning RFID devices or containers placed or logged incorrectly. The containers are moved in and out of the mountainous stacks by rubber-tired gantry cranes—smaller versions of the ship-to-shore cranes—which are mounted on inverted U-shaped frames riding on giant tractor tires instead of towers. As part of the LA–Long Beach green ports initiative, several of the terminals are replacing these traditionally diesel-powered cranes with electrical models. Most of the port terminals in the U.S. have human drivers on their gantry cranes, but driverless automation is being developed to take over this task and cut labor costs. In the twin ports of Southern California, two shipping terminals are rolling out autonomous gantry cranes, so far with mixed success.
The terminals, many of which are subsidiaries of the shipping lines, are charged with moving those containers out of the ports as quickly as possible, but once again overload has complicated the job. Just under a third of the containers depart via dockside rail (or near dockside, after a short truck ride). The Alameda Corridor could handle twice the number of containers currently moving through it, but lack of rail capacity inside the ports represents a bottleneck limiting the number of trains moving cargo through the corridor. Plans to expand the capacity with construction of a new rail yard near the port have been stymied for years. This project, dubbed the Southern California International Gateway, faces neighborhood opposition, environmental complaints, and a lawsuit filed by the City of Long Beach against the City of Los Angeles, which gave the Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway permission to build the facility. BNSF, the nation’s second-largest freight railroad next to Union Pacific, was purchased by billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., in 2010 for $44 billion.
Given the limits on rail movement from the twin ports, the next stage in moving our stuff door to door is all about trucks. About 70 percent of the cargo moves out via drayage trucks, the short-haul semitrailers that jam the ports and surrounding roads, each one carrying a single container. These trucks are a major source of air pollution and traffic congestion in the region.
There are about 10,000 full-time and 4,000 part-time drayage drivers working out of the Long Beach and Los Angeles ports, and each day they swarm the marine terminals. It’s difficult and not always rewarding work, as picking up containers at the ports is a daily exercise in patience and dockside traffic jams even on the best of days. Drayage drivers for the most part are paid by the load, not by the hour, so idle time is a loss for them. The drayage truckers are an important link in the national goods movement system, never straying far but performing the essential service of bringing the still-containerized goods to nearby rail yards and transmodal train terminals,1 product distribution centers, warehouses, and long-haul trucking operations. Except for a few large companies with their own trucking fleets—Walmart, the big food and beverage companies—the next move after drayage for most of the goods that come to America through ports—and from American manufacturers as well—is handled by for-hire trucking fleets and logistics companies. These are traditionally known as the “common carriers.”
So the next stop for most goods out of the Southern California ports are close-in distribution facilities. The nearest network of these is in Carson, the little town on the south end of Los Angeles that Debbie Chavez calls home, where developers are dying to build the next new National Football League venue (commuters on the nearby, already congested 405 Freeway fervently hope they fail), and where a significant portion of the city lives and breathes and profits from its key role in the door-to-door system.
The Watson Land Company is a major force here. It sells that most valuable of quantities in a dense urban area: space. Or, rather, it leases that space on land far too pricey to sell because of its strategic location near the port, rail lines, freeways, and markets. Every port and city has such places, but Watson is a special case. Its owners are descended from the Dominguez Family, which was granted a huge swath of what is now Southern California by the king of Spain. Rancho San Pedro once stretched from where the ports are now all the way north to the edge of downtown, a vast empire of what was then undeveloped coastal vistas and rich farmland, though it has been broken up and sold over time. But the descendants still own 1,500 prime and priceless acres where a network of trucking companies and cargo receivers now reside in industrial and commercial buildings built and leased by Watson. Macy’s, Maersk, International Paper, Alcoa, Mercedes, Bristol Farms, Herbal Life, Dermalogica, U.S. Customs, and a host of logistics companies few would recognize bring their cargo in and through this sprawling campus. Pilar Hoyos, an executive at Watson and another member of the LOLs, sees her company as part of the hidden glue that holds the transportation system together, one of the layers of goods movement as essential as it is little known. She loves to visit her tenants’ operations whenever she can, she says, because seeing the flow of goods, the constant change in taste and trend, is like glimpsing the inner workings of a vast and mysterious machine. “And all can be traced back to the old ranchos and the king of Spain and a family’s decision to hold on to this piece of it.”
But space is only part of the puzzle. If most companies don’t have their own trucking assets, how do they move the goods to their department stores, their shops, their factories? In years past, businesses would make their own arrangements, hire truckers, or haggle with railroads. Some still do. But the trend now is to farm that work out. Companies such as Frontline Freight in the nearby City of Industry work for Watson’s tenants and other businesses across the nation; they are one of a new and growing breed of truckless, trackless transportation companies known as third-party logistics providers or freight forwarders. Frontline has a big warehouse and a computer bank staffed by a roomful of transportation data specialists. Each day the warehouse fills up with every sort of product imaginable, most of it from the ports: Chinese-made life vests, fitness equipment, pottery, barbecues, eight-hundred-pound aircraft parts, clothing, shoes, gourmet restaurant stoves, children’s toys, Halloween costumes. “Here, look at this load,” sales manager Ben Fauver says. “Tree stumps.” A load of tree stumps had come in for use in some sort of outdoor display or movie set. “We get everything. And at the end of the day, everything’s gone. We sweep the deck, and by the next morning it’s full again.”
What Frontline does—like hundreds of other companies in this growing “3PL” line of business—is arrange to receive the goods for an importer or other freight recipient (the goods can be domestic or imported, anything from anywhere is fine) and arrange to have the freight shipped to its final destination. That could be across town, the state, the country, or the world. Think of this business model as a travel agent or, perhaps closer to the mark, an HMO for shipping. Frontline uses the power of pooled customers and insider contacts to negotiate lower rates and faster shipping in exchange for a percentage of the fee. This is, increasingly, how the goods-movement system works, relying on brokers to put the pieces together—brokers not of goods but of movement.
The freight forwarders engineer a triptych for cargo—from port to drayage to carrier—with stops at close-in waypoints such as Watson. Next it’s on to more distant destinations in the California desert, where hundreds of square miles have been transformed into a landscape of sprawling distribution centers (think everything from Amazon to Zappos and every company in between). Next rail, air, and long-haul truckers move the goods to the rest of the nation—on to our stores, our businesses, our hospitals and schools, and through the last mile to us. To our doors.
And it is here, where our stuff meets the road, that the most visible and constant overload kicks in.