Transportation executives wrestling with the supply-chain gridlock that is frustrating U.S. importers say the ability to clear the bottlenecks rests largely on a simple piece of steel and wheels that has long been an afterthought in global shipping.
The trucking trailers, known as chassis and used to ferry containers from dockside terminals, have grown more difficult to find at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, Calif., officials said, as a flood of imports has swamped the facilities and tied up equipment needed to keep goods moving.
Executives close to the operations around the ports say unraveling the gridlock at the coast, including the backup of more than 70 container ships anchored offshore and waiting for berth space, won’t be possible without solving equipment problems, such as the chassis shortage, that have hamstrung operations.
“The chassis are the biggest issue” in problems that stretch from the docks at the neighboring Los Angeles and Long Beach ports to warehouses deeper into California and intermodal rail yards in the Midwest, said Matt Schrap, chief executive of the Harbor Trucking Association, which represents port truckers in Southern California.
The reason container ships are backed up outside the country’s biggest container seaport complex, according to Mr. Schrap and other officials: because dockworkers can’t unload ships quickly because terminals are full of boxes that truckers can’t pick up because they can’t find a chassis. There are roughly 115,000 chassis at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, according to DCLI, a major chassis provider. A little more than half of the frames are privately owned or leased. Truckers can lease the remaining 57,000 chassis from a common pool supplied by DCLI and two other providers.
Normally, there are enough trailers to handle the thousands of containers moving through the ports. But executives say the unrelenting heavy flow of imports that began in the middle of 2020, coupled with labor shortages at warehouses and other cargo-handling facilities, has resulted in the frames being away from the ports for long stretches, crimping the ability of operators to turn around the equipment to carry new boxes.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-simple-piece-of-steel-and-wheels-is-holding-up-the-global-supply-chain-11635452843