West Coast Ports: Most Now Have Normal Operations

West Coast Ports: Most Now Have Normal Operations

Most West Coast ports were busy with activity this week as full crews were ordered by the marine terminals. The ILWU dispatch halls are filling all of the orders.

 Craig Merrilees a union spokesman said:

“ILWU members up and down the coast are working to load and unload vessels as quickly and safely as possible.”  The PMA said that container terminals in Seattle, Tacoma, Oakland, Los Angeles and Long Beach are working to reduce the container and vessel backlogs.

The blatant exception on the coast is Portland.

From a press release, the ICTSI, which operates the Pacific Northwest port’s only container terminal:

“We are currently not seeing a good-faith effort by ILWU to bring productivity at Terminal 6 to acceptable levels. Additionally, the ILWU is failing to provide sufficient labor for needed container vessel and barge operations at the terminal.”

From JOC:

ICTSI accuses the ILWU of consistently hard-timing its operations in Portland since a jurisdictional dispute broke out in June of 2012. Since then, Hanjin on at least two occasions informed the port authority it would pull out of Portland if productivity did not improve. Hanjin recently made good on that threat, announcing that it was discontinuing its weekly Portland service as of March 9, taking with it 95% of Portland’s total container cargo.

From JOC:

The PMA and the ILWU both concede that given the backlog of containers and vessels, and the equipment dislocations that occurred, it could take two months or longer to return to normal operations. On the other hand, container volumes will drop off sharply next week because of the traditional Chinese New Year celebrations in Asia. The last vessels to leave Asian ports before factories shut down on Feb. 19 for two weeks will arrive at West Coast ports next week, and the ports will then have several weeks to work off the backlogs before the factories reopen later in March.