A shortage of chassis to transport the cargo containers to rail yards and warehouses has been a problem for months as shipping lines got out of the chassis business. Now four companies lease out chassis, but there have been kinks in the system at the Port of Long Beach and the Port of Los Angeles. At some terminals there are not enough chassis and at others there are too many.
In October, the Port of Long Beach directed its staff to come up with a plan to introduce 3,000 more chassis into the 100,000-strong chassis pool, but that still isn’t meeting everyone’s needs.
On Dec. 29, the Port of Long Beach opened a temporary storage facility at Pier S on Terminal Island. The idea is to provide more space to place empty cargo containers, remove their chassis and use them to pick up new loads of incoming cargo containers.
The 30-acre site is operated by Pasha Stevedoring & Terminals and open until March 31. On the first day of operation, no one was using the temporary facility, Peterson said. It costs $5 a day to store empty containers, no matter what their size.
The Los Angeles port also has extra land available on Terminal Island to have more space to repair and maintain chassis, but the ILWU contract must be in effect for that to happen. “Everyone thought the [labor] contract would be in place by now,” Sanfield said.
Also, everyone thought the congestion problem would be under control by now, but it will probably be heating up again. “In the next few weeks,” Sanfield said, “we will be looking at the pre-push for the [Chinese] lunar new year.”
