Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (23 page)

The enterprising Wickersham supplied the arrival information to the maritime industry for a fee, and although his service proved popular, his dream of finding fortune in the lookout business fell short. After two years of no profit, he decided to shut down his rooftop crow's nest, but was persuaded instead to turn
the business over to the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. The chamber would subsidize the operation because of its obvious benefits to the business community and the local economy.
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Renamed the Marine Exchange of Los Angeles and freed from the pressure of turning a profit, the service became a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week operation. Onshore communications were switched from megaphones to telephones, with the tower lookouts relaying their information to a central office, which then assembled a daily report of the LA shipping news. The exchange posted the information in the building lobby in San Pedro, but the real breakthrough came when the staffers started relaying the report by phone to subscribers in real time. Soon hundreds of calls a day deluged the office, requiring five separate phone lines to handle all the information requests from paying customers across the city, then beyond.

When the new managers of the exchange figured out that there was a hunger for more data in the industry beyond just the current day's arrivals, they started collecting detailed information on all the ships that ever called at the port, then expanded the service to include a daily report that listed all the arrivals and departures expected for the next three days. When clients demanded even more, the report was expanded to look five days into the future, giving shippers, importers, exporters, and cargo owners unprecedented knowledge of their goods and supply chain. Each day the projections would be updated in case of changes, delays, or early arrivals. At the time, no other U.S. port had anything quite like this, and demand for this advanced planning tool went global. The Marine Exchange soon became financially self-sufficient. The little shack atop the warehouse was replaced with a proper watch tower that offered full amenities for the around-the-clock crew, with an expanded mission to serve the Port of Long Beach as well as Los Angeles.

The Marine Exchange remained essentially unchanged from this 1920s model until the 1990s, serving as a critical information gateway for goods leaving and entering the country. Steamship lines, harbor stevedores, trucking companies, railroads, and the ports themselves depended on that perch atop the warehouse, using its data and predictions to dispatch thousands of workers and vehicles every day, plotting the course of cans of tuna from Thailand, shoes from China, coffee from Colombia. All this information was stored in-house: decades of shipping data going back to 1923, with active shippers and vessels summarized on note cards coded with different colors representing various types of ships: tankers, bulk cargo, fishing craft, and passenger liners. Later, new categories and colors had to be added for container vessels and specialized car carriers. Radar and radio links to ships came online in the fifties and sixties, followed by identifying transponders similar to those used on aircraft. The cards representing a day's vessel traffic in Los Angeles and Long Beach were displayed on a rotating barrel-sized drum that allowed the marine information specialists to single out and update at a glance hundreds of daily shipping movements in the channels, anchorages, berths, and servicing docks. In an analog, pre-Internet age, the homemade spinning barrel and the decks of cards served as a sort of mechanical computer. (It was such an ingenious system that, when it finally gave way to a computer-based version, the Marine Exchange custom software began as a virtual representation of the old analog system, right down to the color coding of the cards.)

For all its ingenuity and value, however, the Marine Exchange suffered from one missing piece that affected capacity, safety, and order at the port. The exchange lacked the authority to use its wealth of time-sensitive information to act as a marine version of air traffic control, even though the increasing business of the port created a pressing need for such a service. The Southern California
shipping lanes, filled with ever larger and more powerful ships, had by the late seventies and early eighties experienced escalating numbers of accidents and many more near misses—up to two hundred a month. As the trans-Asian cargo traffic multiplied and container ships began to increase in number and grow in size, the waters near the ports became a treacherous free-for-all zone. Incoming cargo vessels and tankers would spot other ships approaching and race to the harbor breakwater, directing their own courses, cutting across rival ships, trying to be first to slip inside the opening in the protective stone barrier. The port's first-come, first-served system then in place, and the overload that occurred when there were more ships than berths available, made conflicts and dangerous games of maritime chicken inevitable.

Coast Guard veteran Reid Crispino, who would join the staff at the Marine Exchange after leaving the service, recalls his reaction the first time he saw those old-school, free-for-all lines of ships jockeying to get in first. “This is crazy,” he told a colleague. “But nothing's going to change until something terrible happens.”

Something terrible did happen, though in Alaska, not Los Angeles. A tanker ship laden with Alaskan crude and bound for the Port of Long Beach struck a coastal reef in March 1989, rupturing the hull and spilling as many as 38 million gallons of oil into pristine fisheries and habitats. The running aground of the
Exxon Valdez
marked one of the worst environmental disasters ever in U.S. waters—and one of the most preventable, given that the outcropping the ship rammed was well-known to mariners and charted. One of the many lessons learned from the multiple human and system failures that contributed to this disaster was that a land-based, radar-driven vessel traffic service for directing ships safely near ports and coastal areas could have easily detected the ship's errant course and prevented the spill. The absence of such systems at all but a tiny handful of ports became a national
scandal, and bringing them online became a national priority. By 1994 the Marine Exchange, newly charged with a vessel traffic control mission in partnership with the Coast Guard, moved to its current site atop Angels Gate, far from the signal clutter that made the old warehouse roof a poor spot for modern radar dishes.

Debbie Chavez joined the exchange during this transition time. Charged with helping with the switch from the old cards-on-a-barrel system to modern computers, she eventually became head of the entire marine information service division at the exchange. The modernization (and Chavez's career) paralleled the emergence of the Los Angeles–Long Beach port complex as the leading gateway for America's consumer economy—the place where the door-to-door dance is at its most complex, and where overload is now a daily reality, although in ways no one could have imagined back in 1994.

O
n February 13, 2015, the maritime information manager arrives at Angels Gate in the gray light of early morning. Fingers of wispy mist stretch out over the waters below the Marine Exchange, enough for her to feel the gloom and winter chill, but too thin to conceal the long line of waiting ships. The cargo vessels stacked high with Lego-colored containers stretch down the coast as far as she can see, a twenty-mile-long queue of goods and food and fuel and delay. The line will only grow longer this day, she knows. But the goods-movement ballet has to go on, and it starts this day, as usual, with Debbie Chavez, her five marine information specialists, and their phones. It's time to crank up the Boiler Room.

That's what they call it during those busy morning hours after dawn in Chavez's warren of offices staffed by men and women with phones glued to their ears. Tucked out of sight from the breathtaking panoramic views that dominate the traffic control
room, the information service's resemblance to a telemarketing sweatshop or election phone-bank boiler room at these times is obvious. And boiling it is, as port congestion has never been worse than this month's backlog. It had been bad at many ports around the country lately, but murderous on the West Coast, where the longshoremen's union has been working without a contract for nearly a year, unable to come to terms with the shipping lines. The shippers, truckers, and union workers pointed fingers at one another for causing the ocean traffic jam. Although the Marine Exchange is neutral—the Switzerland of the seafaring world, as executive director Captain J. Kip Louttit, likes to say—the rancor had rendered Chavez's job all the harder. All her contacts were on edge.

She settles behind the computer monitors at her desk and tackles the first task: pinning down the expected arrivals, verifying that they are on schedule as predicted the day before. Chavez looks over the list and begins making her calls, starting with the nation's oldest and largest shipping agent, Norton Lilly International, which keeps an office in Long Beach, close to the conjoined ports and their clients. Norton represents owners of four of the five expected arrivals this day, including one of the biggest ships calling on the port complex, the
MSC Flavia
, a Mediterranean Shipping Company vessel capable of carrying 6,200 standard forty-foot containers.
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Today it carries a mix of clothing, electronics, shoes, and a panoply of other goods from Europe and Asia bound for Target, Macy's, Kohl's, and thousands of other businesses near and far. Many steps remain in the ballet before any goods reach their ultimate recipients, the BCOs (beneficial cargo owners) in shipping parlance. The congestion delays have them all anxious, angry, and wondering if they should instead have shipped via some other port—or some other method, such as air freight.

The
Flavia
has just arrived in the vicinity and is working its way to an anchorage outside the Port of Los Angeles, where it will, like almost every other ship, have to wait for a berth. Chavez and her staff soon verify that four other container vessels have arrived early in the morning, two for Long Beach, one more for LA, all three assigned to “waiting-room” anchorages outside the ports proper. A fifth container vessel has arrived but its anchorage and port of call remain undetermined, as it carries freight for both LA and Long Beach, a complication of the new alliances among shippers that contributes to overload. Eight more ships are expected to arrive today, Chavez and her staff verify, but they are still at sea, hovering outside the two-hundred-mile limit and its pollution regulations, so they can continue to burn their cheapest, dirtiest fuel. This also keeps them far outside the twenty-five-mile coastal zone in which they must contact and accept direction from the Marine Exchange traffic controllers.

Next Chavez has to verify the day's “shifts.” These are the ships moving between remote anchorages and berths inside the port terminals for loading and unloading. Only two vessels will be making it to berths today, neither of them container ships. Three others will be shifting to anchorages while they await spots at one of the thirteen massive container terminals at the two ports.

Chavez passes all this new information on to the traffic controllers stationed in the Watch, whose computer-rendered images of the ports begin to pulse with alerts about the pending moves. This system is a dramatic improvement compared to the analog days, when Chavez would walk over to a window dividing her operation from the Watch and write the updates on the glass with a grease pencil. She had to write backwards, so the controllers could read it from their side.

The updated arrival information next goes out to the port pilots so they can use it to plan their staffing, and to all the other
Marine Exchange subscribers up and down the supply chain. Then Chavez moves on to the rest of the day's and week's ship movements so that the advance reports can be updated and all the many players at the port, from terminals to longshoremen to pilots to crane operators to rail and truck haulers, can plan the days ahead, staffing the right number of people, preparing the right number of freight cars and trailer chassis, assemble the right number of gangs to unload the ships, to fuel them, to supply the vessels with food, water, and equipment. So much depends on Chavez's reports, but congestion at the ports is taking its toll, the worst delays and backlog she's seen in twenty-one years. That's how long it's been since this working mom born, raised, and still living in her hometown of Carson, California, left her bank teller job to dive into the world of port traffic.

The shipping snapshot she and her team crafted for February 13 reveals the depth of the overload:

One of the twenty-seven ships stalled by overload, the 4,000-ton container ship
MSC Charleston
has been waiting three weeks at anchor. Another ten of the ships delayed by congestion have been waiting ten days or more. The largest ship in either port, the
COSCO Denmark
, carrying 7,000 containers, began day five of its wait for a berth in Long Beach this day. In all, 19 container ships with a combined capacity of more than 80,000 containers are stalled in congested anchorages along with six break-bulk vessels and two general cargo ships carrying such items as fabricated steel girders, earthmovers, bulldozers, and aircraft components too large for containers. Those stalled ships hold billions of dollars' worth of cargo, all of it either late for delivery or soon to be overdue. Businesses with short time frames—candy, toy, and the gift businesses awaiting goods for Valentine's Day—are losing millions. Sale items already advertised are not on department store shelves. Now the springtime–Easter holiday products that should have already arrived are missing in action, too.