San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Big traffic jam on S.F. Bay — huge cargo ships wait to dock
For the past few weeks, San Francisco Bay has been packed with huge cargo ships. There were 15 of them anchored south of the Bay Bridge at midweek. There is so much ship traffic that there is not enough room inside the bay for them all to anchor safely. Nine more big ships were waiting in the Pacific, steaming up and down 20 to 30 miles offshore between Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay.
It’s part of the West Coast maritime traffic jam, the biggest in years.
“It’s very unusual,” said Capt. Lynn Korwatch, executive director of the Marine Exchange, which monitors shipping in the bay and its ports.
“It’s unprecedented,” said James Hill, the Marine Exchange’s operations director.
“It’s crazy, crazy,” said Capt. John Carlier, president of the San Francisco Bar Pilots Association, whose members navigate ships in and out of the bay.
But the traffic jam is more than a maritime mess. The crowd of ships on San Francisco Bay is part of the increasingly complex world of global trade.
“It involves everything,” said Donald Maier, dean of the California Maritime Academy’s School of Maritime Transportation, Logistics and Management. “Ninety percent of all we use comes by sea.”
“I use the simple Number 2 pencil as an example for my beginning students,”’ he said. “The graphite comes from China, the wood comes from the United States, the metal band around the top comes from Mexico, and it’s assembled in Asia and then shipped by sea to the United States, which is the biggest market.” Sea transportation is the key, he said, because it makes the product affordable.
“And when you think of the parts of a simple pencil, think of the complexities of building an aircraft or the parts of an automobile,” he said.
This is where the West Coast maritime traffic jam comes in. It began at the turn of the year, when the Asian market emerged from the COVID lockdown. Factories reopened in Asia, and at the same time the American market took a big jump. Imports increased by 26% in midwinter, according to figures supplied by the Port of Oakland.
Suddenly, West Coast ports were booming. Most trade with Asia comes through the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. The two together are the busiest in the United States with nearly three times as much container ship traffic as New York/New Jersey, the country’s second busiest. But the Southern California ports couldn’t handle all the business. There was a labor shortage. One reason for that was not enough dock workers were vaccinated. There was also a fuel problem at Long Beach. Ships started backing up. At one point, close to 40 big container ships loaded with cargo were anchored in San Pedro Bay, waiting for a berth.
So managers diverted the ships to Oakland, the main container ship terminal in San Francisco Bay and the nation’s fourth largest port. But Oakland was installing a new set of container cranes, and only three berths were available for the big ships that showed up. And there was a COVIDcaused labor shortage here, too.
“It was like airplanes stacking up in a winter storm,” Maier said. “A domino effect.”
But these were big, slow ships, loaded with millions of dollars in cargo aboard from electronics to running shoes.
“It’s a perfect storm in shipping now,” said Capt. John Konrad, who runs gCaptain, a maritime industry news service.
Shipowners counted on a quick turnaround at West Coast ports. Typically, sources say, a container ship calling at Oakland would spend 18 hours in and out of the Golden Gate. Now it takes days. Carlier says he heard of one ship that had to anchor for two weeks waiting for a berth. And time is money.
An example of the problem is the voyage of the container ship CMA CGM T.Jefferson. The ship is 1,200 feet long, only 112 feet shorter than the Ever Given, the ship that ran aground and blocked the Suez Canal in March. The Ever Given was described in the media as “colossal, a giant, a behemoth,” descriptions that might also apply to the T.Jefferson.
The T.Jefferson, which is four times the size of the famous ocean liner Titanic and is as large as a modern aircraft carrier, is named for an American president, operated by a French firm and flies the flag of Malta. It sailed from a Chinese port on Feb. 14 for Los Angeles, where it normally would have spent a day unloading cargo. According to public data, it spent nearly seven days in the Los Angeles area, then sailed on a 17hour voyage to the Golden Gate. It dropped anchor before dawn Thursday not far from Oracle Park in the central part of the bay.
How long the ship will remain at anchor depends on a number of factors, Very large ships like the T.Jefferson are examples of the new breed of larger and larger cargo ships and need special attention. Their movement depends on tides, the availability of a berth and shoreside labor. Normally, a big ship like the T.Jefferson would sail up the Oakland Estuary straight from sea and not have to spend time at anchor. It would be accompanied by tugs and navigated under control of one or more pilots. The 1,200footlong ship would be turned 180 degrees in a basin a ways up the estuary. The turning basin has a diameter of just under 1,500 feet, so turning a 1,200foot ship there is a delicate maneuver.
The port congestion has caused other problems, Carlier said. On occasion, he said, ships sailing outside waiting to get into the bay have run low on fuel. “So they have to come in and refuel, and if there is no room for them in the bay, they have to go back out again and wait. That’s what’s really crazy.”
How long will the jam last?
“I don’t have a crystal ball,” Carlier said. “I don’t know.”