Ricky Ponce spends his days moving controls that look like toy joysticks, but his job is one of the most dangerous games around: lifting multi-ton cargo containers and lowering them onto trucks as gently as setting grocery bags on a kitchen counter.
Ponce works in a tiny, trolley-mounted cabin, hanging about 140 feet off the ground, running one of the Port of Long Beach’s new breed of supersized ship-to-shore cranes.
Ocean shipping lines keep ordering bigger and bigger ships as they try to grab business from one another. At the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the nation’s biggest shipping complex, that means buying bigger and bigger cranes.