10/11/2021

Nearly Half a Million Shipping Containers are Stuck off the Coast of California

Endless ports are operating below capacity

The largest port in the U.S. faces a near-record backlog of cargo ships, and there's no end in sight.

On Tuesday, Los Angeles had nearly half a million 20-foot shipping containers — or about 12 million metric tons of goods — waiting in drift areas and at anchor for spots to open up along the port to dock and unload, according to data pulled from the Marine Exchange of Southern California's master queuing list. The port has 19 mega-container ships waiting to dock, the largest of which is carrying 16,022 20-foot shipping containers.

"Part of the problem is the ships are double or triple the size of the ships we were seeing 10 or 15 years ago," said Kip Louttit, the executive director of the Marine Exchange of Southern California, to Business Insider earlier this year. "They take longer to unload. You need more trucks, more trains, more warehouses to put the cargo."

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