A day at the docks exposes a supply chain left high and dry

Photos: Itzik Photography

The seagulls soaring overhead  and the clanking of marine equipment testify to the proximity of the ocean — but for some reason, the air near the container shipping port in Bayonne, New Jersey, smells more like fuel than saltwater.

“You don’t really smell the seawater because it’s masked by the fuel produced by the glut of massive shipping containers around the port,” says Baruch Guzelgul, veteran sailor, trucker, and owner of Monsey One Trucking.

I watched as one large ship was being unloaded in the port. The freighter wasn’t exactly graceful, but it’s easy to be impressed by its giant size and the enormity of its load. The ship, marked with the letters CMA for the French carrier and the fourth-largest shipper in the world, was unloading 15,000 rusty yet colorful containers whose contents held anything from clothing for Macy’s and plastic bottles for Kedem to coins for Brinks and wood chips and steel to supply the East Coast’s growing housing demand.

A series of gigantic quay cranes reached out from under a conveyor, briskly transferring one container after the other from ship to shore. While the ship is nowhere near empty, a yard nearby is full of containers piled high, awaiting the fleets of trucks that will whisk them to their next destination. A second ship, identified by its white markings as coming from Israeli shipping giant ZIM, waited patiently under the distant Verrazano Bridge for its turn.

Things actually look calm and organized here, contrary to the scenes of backed-up container ships outside the ports on America’s West Coast. The delays, apparently, are coming only from other parts of the country. In New York and New Jersey, according to Amanda Kwan, the senior public information officer at the Port Authority, the ports had virtually no delays.

“As of this morning,” she told me, “we only have one ship waiting offshore, and on average for this year so far, waiting time is less than a day and a half. So we’re not experiencing the bottlenecks that you’re hearing about.”

The Bayonne port has a capacity of handling one big ship at a time, and it takes between one and two days to unload. It’s dwarfed by the one in Newark, which has six terminals and can service six ships at a time. The Port Authority also runs a port in nearby Staten Island.

“It takes about three weeks to come from China to New Jersey, and a day or two to unload,” Guzelgul said. “Until now, the longest a ship might have waited was two days in anchor. Now, they’re coming in and waiting for weeks. In Long Beach, you have over a hundred ships waiting in line and they can’t even get into the port.

“When I send a truck to the port,” he added, “in regular times it takes me two or three hours to begin loading. Now it can sometimes take me eight hours. Everything has a domino effect — the delays start from China, move on to the ports, comes to us, and then goes on to the stores and customers.”

But while Bayonne is calm and peaceful, that’s not the scene outside the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach on America’s West Coast, in Savannah on the East Coast, or countless ports in China and across the commercial world.

The world is currently in the thrall of a giant snarl-up, the likes of which has never been seen. As of the end of last week, the port monitoring site Marine Exchange reported, there were 153 ships waiting in both California ports — in Los Angeles and Long Beach, the largest and second largest port in the country, respectively, which together handle 40 percent of America’s shipping — including 97 loitering, representing about 200,000 containers and carrying $24 billion in goods. The average wait time is ten days.

This is more than double the number of ships waiting just two weeks ago. If you calculate the amount of goods caught in this marine traffic jam, the cargo waiting along the Pacific coastline is the equivalent of six million cars, 150 million fridges, and a gut-punching 150 billion bananas.