This is a follow-up to the original explanation of the epicenter of the supply chain backlog issue, ie “The Clog“. {GO DEEP} You need to review the years-long and building background issue to understand the fubar that Joe Biden has just made worse.
From the White House perspective, the problem at the California ports, specifically the Port of Los Angeles (POLA) and the Port of Long Beach (POLB), was visible due to hundreds of container ships sitting in a queue off the coast of Los Angeles awaiting their opportunity to offload their cargo. The media was reporting on the backlog of ships and Joe Biden was under fire.
The team behind Joe Biden wanted the optics removed asap. Hence, the White House meeting with the heads of the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, Gene Seroka and Mario Cordero, respectively.
The continuing supply chain crisis of empty store shelves, missing parts and component goods that are backlogged at the California ports may be politically represented by the optic of those floating vessels. However, that’s not the problem.
The problem is a shortage of CA emission compliant internal transportation trucks to move the containers out of the port and into the U.S. mainland.
As a result… the politically expedient goal to get rid of the optical problem (the ships) by offloading containers into a California port system, that is already overwhelmed with tens-of-thousands of containers, is only making the original issue exponentially worse.
With hundreds more containers being offloaded hourly, the port infrastructure needed to load trucks long-sitting in the queue to pick up containers that arrived weeks ago is collapsing.
Truckers are waiting for over 8 hours to pick up their freight because the yards are swamped with containers. As each hour passes, more containers are offloaded into the port that can no longer deal with the scale of the problem. Each individual container is now buried in an avalanche of more containers, and that is making the limited compliant trucking resources even more problematic….. “containergeddon“.
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