Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (24 page)

A year earlier, cargo ships faced little or no wait for a berth, and the turnaround—the time it takes to reach a terminal, unload, reload, and depart—was a point of pride for both ports as well as a source of competitive advantage. At that time, ships averaged less than three days in port, with small ships moving out sooner than that, and larger ones taking longer. Now Friday the thirteenth has doubled turnaround times for some shipping lines, and tripled or quadrupled those times for others.

Part of this arose from the long-standing labor dispute at the port and bickering over contract terms that had led to alleged
slowdowns by workers and lockouts by shippers. Everyone from the White House down to the mayors of the two port cities have expressed growing frustration at the seemingly endless feud with such potentially dire consequences for the economy. Yet the high-stakes contract argument did not erupt over such straightforward points as money or automation. Instead the battle began over the more arcane question of whether the arbitrator who settles disputes between labor and management should be appointed for life or have a fixed term. (The shipping lines, who like the current arbitrator, want him to stay in place forever; the union, not so much.) But the long-term problem of congestion has more behind it than the lack of a longshoreman's contract. Bigger ships hauling more cargo have been taxing port operations and the trucking industry for years with the sheer bulk of shipments flooding the docks when big ships arrive in clusters. And the new trend of shipping alliances has made handling the larger loads on each ship more complex, as it has required some ships to stop at multiple terminals.

Another major factor has been the trucking foul-ups caused when shipping lines unilaterally decided to stop a decades-old practice of supplying the wheeled chassis that turn containers into semitrailers. The decision saved the shipping lines money but created havoc as the ports and freight-hauling companies struggled to set up alternatives—no easy matter when the majority of the trucks servicing the port are small owner-operated businesses working on contract. For much of 2014 and 2015, chassis shortages drove the port truckers away, imposing onerous delays on those who remained as hundreds of thousands of containers piled up in dockside mountains, undelivered. Truckers who once simply arrived at the port, picked up a container and chassis combo, then left suddenly and had to make multiple stops, first to find a chassis, then to pick up a container somewhere
else at the port, and then wend their way back to the exit. Predictably, this created in-port traffic jams, unproductive down time, and a chain reaction of delayed cargo. This sort of congestion and overload at ports is a nationwide phenomenon, not just a Los Angeles thing. New York/New Jersey, Oakland, Virginia, and others have been hit hard, too, as well as the intermodal rail terminals in the Midwest that handle the goods moving to and from the coasts. Trucks sitting and waiting to pick up and deliver containers contribute to excess air pollution and carbon emissions, and impose huge costs on the consumer economy: $348 million wasted a year, a figure that includes nine million gallons in wasted diesel fuel and fifteen million hours of wasted worker time.
³

Settling the labor dispute with a new contract would provide short-term relief, but would not address any of these other overload threats.

“Our position is that we're the honest broker. We take no sides on any of this,” Chavez says, looking over the long list of ships parked, knowing that every extra day in port costs money and jobs up and down the chain. “But it's not taking sides to state the obvious: this is a mess. Everybody loses.”

U
p in the Watch, gesturing at the long line of ships snaking south down the coast, general manager Reid Crispino says, “See for yourself. It goes all the way down to Huntington Beach.”

Oustide the picture window, the twenty-mile-long line of waiting ships stretches as far as the eye—or the telescope—can see. It vanishes into the distance.

Crispino falls quiet a moment as a colleague speaks softly into a radio microphone, confirming a container ship's position in the distant contingency anchorages. On the large multicolor
computer display, which combines radar, GPS, and transponder signals from the ships with a map overlay of the ports, the dot representing the ship on the radio seems to be floating inside a force-field bubble. The screen image represents the circular buffer zone that each cargo ship in the anchorages is supposed to maintain to avoid collisions. That bubble is 1,200 yards—more than a half mile—in diameter. No other ship may enter that circle. However, it's the Marine Exchange's vigilance, not force fields, that keeps ships separated in congested waters. This is a necessary protection given that these massive vessels are surprisingly fast but not very agile. Collisions are almost unheard-of and near misses are a fraction of what they were in the eighties, Crispino says. “If any good came out of the
Exxon Valdez
, you're seeing it on that screen.”

Crispino, like so many others working at the port, has been a lifelong mariner. He grew up in Anaheim, California, a few miles from Disneyland, but his landlocked home only heightened his attraction to the sea. He learned to sail before he could drive, navigated solo to Catalina Island thirty miles offshore when he was thirteen years old, and joined the Coast Guard at age seventeen. In the service, he worked fishery patrols in Alaska, was engaged in the search-and-rescue branch in California for eight years, returned to Alaska to help with the
Valdez
oil spill cleanup, and retired after more than twenty years of service. He joined the Marine Exchange in 1997, happy for a more stable home and work life at this center of the shipping universe and consumer economy. Still, he admits that, like almost all the veteran mariners here, he still misses the exotic travel, the feel of a deck underfoot, the spray in his face. Then he thinks how miserable those crews must be trapped out in those anchorages, and working with a computer display of ships rather than the real thing doesn't seem so bad after all.

The radio squawks again. It has been a slow day—congestion means less to do on the Watch, not more—but it is time for a shift. Berth and course information are exchanged and confirmed by radio, and the traffic controller calls the pilot's office over at Long Beach.

“At least someone's going to unload today,” Crispino says as the ship in its bubble begins to move across his screen.

T
he little pilot boat bounces and slaps the waves as it sidles next to the towering cargo vessel as they match speed and course, the little boat looking hopelessly fragile next to its eight-story, windowless counterpart—an egg challenging China's Great Wall.

The cargo vessel
Wisdom Ace
looks more like a floating building than a ship, which makes sense: it is, in effect, a floating parking garage, a very specialized sort of cargo ship known as a RO-RO (for “roll-on, roll-off”). It's a car carrier, and the beauty of this type of vessel is that the cargo can be driven on and off rather than craned into place like containers. Today the
Wisdom Ace
carries 5,000 Mercedes cars and SUVs from Germany, parked and lashed bumper to bumper on the ship's many low-roofed decks. The Jacobsen Pilot Service boat is there to deliver a pilot, whose job is to bring the big ship and its costly cargo safely in to dock.

The Jacobsen boat steers close enough to count the rivets in the big ship's looming expanse of steel plating; close enough to lean out and
touch
the rivets.

A third of the way up the featureless expanse of the
Wisdom Ace
's hull—which is long and wide enough to cover two football fields—a door opens out to nowhere about twenty feet above the
roiling water. This is the pilot's door. A rope ladder is dangled from it, and two men peer down, one of them waving.

“That's my cue.” Bob Blair stands up and stretches. He had been resting in the sun-drenched stern of the boat, maybe even dozing. It seems mariners can sleep through chop and wind and the approach of floating parking structures, no problem. He had been up since three that morning, after all, and this would be the third ship he piloted this day through the Port of Long Beach's narrow and quirky channels, which feature a bridge so old it must wear a diaper to catch falling bricks, and submerged obstructions with such ominous nicknames as “the Can Opener.” Blair, like his fellow pilots, knows all these idiosyncrasies, dangers, twists, and tight spaces as no visiting helmsman could. It's his job to find the safest course to bring the cargo across the last few watery miles of a global crossing.

The sandy-haired man with the blue dress shirt, necktie, and immaculate black windbreaker steps up to the portside gunwale of his boat, adjusts the zipper on his jacket, and then leans out over the whitecaps. Without breaking stride, Blair grabs the rope ladder and steps up onto its nearest rung, a single fluid, casual motion, as if he were stepping from street to curb rather than leaping onto a steel-walled monster that could kill him in an instant if he slipped. He nimbly scales the ladder and disappears through the door as the pilot boat peels off, dodging the frothing wake kicked out from the big car carrier.

Less than forty-five minutes later, Blair eases the
Wisdom Ace
through the port and into its berth at Pier F so the stevedore gang can begin unleashing the cars, driving them down the ramp and off to a holding area. Luxury cars and SUVs stream off the ship like spectators leaving the ballpark after a game.

It is almost 11:00 a.m. by now, and Blair awaits word on his next assignment: piloting a container ship out of China to the backlog anchorage.

“Every port is different,” Blair observes. “These ships call all over the world. There's no way their crews can know how to get in and out of each and every port. There would be slowdowns or accidents all the time. The ports require pilots because we know our ports. We cut the risk. I wouldn't say we're treated like royalty when we board a ship, but they're usually glad to see us.”

Port pilots are among the elite of the shipping world, part of its hidden choreography, essential but unheralded professionals who keep the cargo moving through its tightest, most congested spots. They board the ships as they arrive and take them to their berths, then guide them back to the anchorages when they depart. Tugboats assist with the large ships, teams of them on windy days, as the immense cargo vessels act like sails because they present such a large surface for wind to act upon. A 15-knot breeze can generate one hundred tons of force on a container ship, enough to blow it sideways or cause its tail to swing around. Tugs have to exert that much pressure on the downwind side to counteract that force—it would take two or three to match that 15-knot breeze—all under the direction of the pilot. Pilots never touch a control but stand on the bridge and instruct the crew on speed, course, and turns. Blair says there is often a language barrier, but the simple commands are known by all in any language, and he usually makes his meaning clear. It is a formal and ritualistic process at times, the welcome sometimes lavish, with offers of food and beverages, and at other times it's more tense and wary. But the pilot's word is always final while in the port waters.

By way of comparison, port pilots are the surgeons who swoop into town to perform some complex, difficult procedure on a patient whose regular crew of caregivers does all the prep work and aftercare. Or perhaps the pilot's role is best likened to the short relief pitcher in baseball, brought in to record that last out or two with everything on the line. It's stressful but over quick, the
end of an ocean journey that lasts weeks on the open water, but where the risk is rarely greater than when the ship is a handful of miles from port. The pilots are the closers of the door-to-door world, a breed apart, with coveted jobs that pay some of the highest salaries in the marine business. Certainly the compensation is comparable to surgeons and professional ballplayers, ranging from about $300,000 to nearly half a million dollars a year.

Most are career mariners. Blair came up as a tugboat pilot, those essential helpers when maneuvering big ships through narrow port channels. He eventually applied for a pilot's job at Jacobsen, which tests its applicants mercilessly and, given the rewards, can afford to be choosy. He's been there eleven years, which ranks him among the least senior of the pilots. Jacobsen is a destination job in the port piloting field, and it's run like a family business despite taking part in 7,000 ship moves a year: everything in Long Beach, plus the U.S. Navy ships moving in and out of the nearby Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach, plus the small number of American-flagged vessels calling at the Port of Los Angeles, mostly oil tankers.

Jacobsen is a unique presence in the port pilot business, a private company where the seventeen pilots have ownership interest, compared to most other operations, where the pilots work in a union shop or are municipal employees, as in the Port of Los Angeles. Jacobsen has held the piloting contract in Long Beach since 1922, when the company was founded by an immigrant Norwegian fisherman, and it has been run by three successive generations of Jacobsens ever since. Blair's boss, Captain John Strong, head pilot and vice president at Jacobsen, has been a pilot for thirty-two years and a mariner even longer, serving on research vessels out of San Diego (where he worked for the man who discovered the wreck of the
Titanic
), supply ships out of Tahiti and the Virgin Islands, and oil tankers in the Gulf of
Mexico. He has always loved to be at sea—a compulsion, he says, fueled by a restlessness that inevitably seized him if he stayed land-bound too many months. Through his wanderings he found three wives and lost two of them, felt the pain of coming home to kids who did not recognize him, and then found that the pilot's life could be the best of both worlds. A pilot can be on the water all day and yet home for supper every night, which meant his third marriage has stuck now for twenty-two years and counting.

“I'm the kind of guy who has to be at sea and who has to be married,” he says. “So this has worked out well for me.”

Of his job, he says it often boils down to this: “We are the only ones who can tell a ship's captain: No.”

The pilot's job has grown more complicated during his career, first due to the containerization revolution, and most recently because of the trend toward ever-larger mega-ships. Now the ships are so big that when the pilots sail up the channel to the Long Beach inner harbor, they cannot even see the water or how close the ship is to the banks. The clearance in the tight spots could be as little as fifty feet on either side of the bigger ships, which, by comparison, would be like driving a car for miles with less than two feet of clearance on either side. (Drivers are accustomed to much more clearance than that: typical freeway lanes are twelve feet wide, twice the width of the average car, so that on a two-lane highway there's usually about six feet of separation side to side between vehicles.) With clearance proportional to the tight inner channels of the Port of Long Beach, a twitch of the wheel would crash the car—or the container ship—into a wall.

Technology has come to the aid of the pilots, while the job remains a curious mixture of primitive and advanced. The rope ladders are right out of the
Mutiny on the Bounty
days, but Bob
Blair also packs a state-of-the-art wireless GPS tablet with live feeds of port conditions, traffic, tides, winds, and depth in order to navigate those tight blind spots without incident.

The inner harbor presents particularly tight quarters with very busy port terminals inside. Ships headed there pass beneath the aged Gerald Desmond Bridge, which links the harbor to the critical-goods corridor of the 710 Freeway. This is the bridge with the diaper: nets underneath have hung there for years to catch crumbling concrete that has been raining down from the bridge as the structure slowly disintegrates from heavy use. The port officials estimate that 15 percent of U.S. consumer goods cross that bridge every day, although it is too fragile and too low at 155 feet for modern cargo ships. Radar and radio antennae have to be retracted on the tallest vessels, navigation masts folded, flags lowered. The quarters are so tight that, during the passage of one monster cargo ship stacked high with containers on deck, Strong actually had to stop the vessel and clamber atop the containers with a yardstick in hand to make sure the ship could pass beneath the bridge safely. It did, with inches to spare—at low tide.

A $1.5 billion replacement bridge with more lanes, bike and pedestrian ways, and a 205-foot clearance to accommodate larger ships was expected to open by 2018—over budget and two years late.

The inner harbor area has another bottleneck near a power plant, where a water intake valve extends into the channel. This is the spot the pilots call “the Can Opener” because it could puncture a ship's hull and rip it open like a tin can if not avoided. It's slated to be removed eventually to create more leeway for the big ships.

“Every trip is different,” Strong tells his pilots. “Different ship. Different crew. The weather changes. You can have the best voyage plan in the world, but you have to go in with no assumptions.
Because I guarantee things will change. And you'll have to respond.”

W
hen the pilot's job is done, the cargo still lingers at the port—too long for anyone's liking during times of congestion and overload—but it stops being ocean freight at that point and becomes land freight. And it is here that the ingenious design of the modern container ship—as opposed to the age-old design of bulk cruisers with traditional holds, ramps, and hoists—comes into play.

The old way—dating back three thousand years to the ancient Phoenician traders with their monopoly on precious royal purple dye, and continuing right into the post–World War II era—was to unload a ship as a moving company would empty a house. Stevedores would manually carry out furniture, boxes, and sacks, loading them on—depending on the era and place—trucks or boxcars, horse carts or camel caravans. The modern way is like a factory assembly line, all huge machines and rapid repetition, enabled by the complementary symmetry of container ship and shipping container. They're all standardized. And so every move to load or unload is the same. This makes for a mechanized dockside world that is fast and fearful and dangerous—and, aside from contract disputes and other hitches and obstacles, incredibly efficient. Humans need not enter the cargo hold of a container ship. Indeed, it can be perilous for them to do so, and while containers are being unloaded, only a slip and a fall will put a human body in the mix, never with good results. In 2014, a dockworker tumbled through a gap in containers aboard a small Panamanian freighter at the port, seriously injuring his legs and back. There have been deaths at world ports from similar mishaps.

The ship's design enables this hands-free efficiency. A modern
container ship is built in sections called cells, which is why such a vessel is also called a cellular ship—not because of its wireless capabilities, but because it is assembled like a cross section in reverse. Imagine taking a passenger car and, beginning with the front end, slicing it from hood ornament to ground level, then carving one after another vertical section, each about a foot wide. On the gargantuan scale of container ships, these are the sorts of sectional building blocks that are crafted separately, complete with all the internals—conduits and corridors, plumbing and wiring, support beams and hatches. At the shipyard, these cells are then placed together, their components connected and the metal structures bolted and welded into whole ships. And the secret sauce inside the vast hollow interiors of these ships, built into every cell before they are assembled, is the system of container guide channels: vertical rails that become part of a ship's superstructure and sized exactly for standard forty-foot shipping containers. The rails guide the big metal boxes into place in orderly, tight-packed, and secure rows right down to the deepest level of a vessel, so cans don't have to be painstakingly positioned. They are just lowered, slid, and locked into place.

This simple, ingenious design allows not only for rapid-fire loading and unloading but also meticulous cargo planning. Each container's place on a ship is identified by three map coordinates: the vertical row, measured from number one at the bow of the ship, increasing toward the aft; the horizontal tier, with number one starting at the bottom layer of containers and moving up in number toward the top of the stack; and the slot, which measures container position from side to side, with even numbers on the port side and odd numbers starboard. Even with 6,000 containers on board, the position of every piece of containerized cargo is known (although the mega-shipping alliances have undermined the efficiency of this system by jumbling together cargo from different shipping lines).