“The ‘gray’ chassis pool will add fluidity to the system, but it is not going to mean everything will be hunky dory,” said Phil Connors, executive vice president of Flexi-Van Leasing.
He noted that during the second week of this year, there were 5,800 chassis in marine terminals “that had not seen the light of day for 15 days or greater.” Some of those were damaged, but some of them were fully functional chassis stacked among the ones that needed to be repaired.
Another kink in the system is that in recent weeks, marine terminals have not been accepting empty cargo containers to load onto ships because there was just not enough room to stack them on the overcrowded docks. “Some terminals have been saying, ‘Don’t bring me your empties,’ ” Connors complained. “Well, underneath that empty [container] is a chassis.”
