They were waiting for the moment when they could call for a pilot to board the ship and guide them through the murky Houston Ship Channel to the port. One day in late October, there were two container ships at anchor in the Gulf of Mexico off of Galveston Island waiting to unload because there wasn't enough room at the container terminal. The backup at the Houston port is rippling throughout the community "We've had as many as five to 10 ships sitting outside waiting for a berth," Guenther says.Ĭrew members of a docked container ship are seen as the cargo is loaded onto trucks below. Without enough trucks to move the steel boxes out of the yard, there's not enough room temporarily to store the containers arriving on cargo ships.
In Houston, the pileup at the port is exacerbated by a shortage of truck drivers and trucks to haul containers.
For instance, orders for Nike sneakers will be months late because of backups due to lockdowns at footwear factories in Vietnam. In Asia, manufacturers shut down for weeks as the Delta variant raced around the world earlier this year. They've been able to absorb the surge because of recent expansion nevertheless, the "dwell time" of containers waiting for pickup has doubled from four days to eight days. He says their container cargo is up 16% in 2021 over 2020. The container terminals are becoming the warehouse for all these goods." "It's filling up our terminals, filling up all of our extra space. "What you're seeing at our port and a lot of other ports across the nation is this surge in imports is really putting a strain on the supply chain," Guenther says. Roger Guenther, executive director of the Port of Houston, watches unloading at Bayport Container Terminal in Seabrook, Texas.Īs many as five to 10 ships sitting outside waiting for a berth The supply chain infrastructure - hobbled by the pandemic slowdown and a shortage of space and workers - was not prepared for the tsunami of consumer cargo. The same thing is happening, to a greater or lesser degree, at every container port in the United States, from Los Angeles to Savannah, Ga.
All available space is occupied by towers of multicolored containers that are stranded here until trucks can arrive to haul them to, say, a Walmart distribution center. The evidence of the pandemic-fueled orgy of online purchasing is plain to see here at the Port of Houston - the nation's sixth largest container port, and the first in total waterborne tonnage. "Since they weren't going on vacation and going to restaurants and buying services, they started buying furniture and bicycles and home improvement goods." His voice trails off. "When everybody was staying home and they were getting stimulus checks, they started buying," Guenther says.
Another truck quickly wheels into place awaiting the next steel box packed with the endless merchandise that Americans buy with a click and "Add To Cart." Roger Guenther, executive director of the port, watches through his dark glasses late last month as the truck drives away and disappears into a canyon of steel boxes stacked as tall as a five-story building. The maneuver is repeated thousands of times, day and night, here at the busy Port of Houston. A gargantuan crane plucks a rust-colored container from a cargo ship nearly as long as three football fields, and drops it onto a truck with a metallic groan.