October 29, 2021 – Shipping carriers Maersk and MSC, with VSA partner Zim, will drop Seattle from the schedule of their service this week, due to port congestion.
MSC said the decision was “due to the increased waiting time for vessel berthing”, which it said was “impacting schedule reliability and causing delays to shipments.” The carriers said the omission was temporary.
According to eeSea data, the 2M and Zim deploy seven 4,253 twenty-foot equivalent units (teu) to 8,850 teu vessels on the weekly loop. Their only other West Coast calling port is Vancouver.
In its most recent North America operational update, Hapag-Lloyd reported that, as of October 15, there were 11 ships awaiting a berth at Seattle ports with berthing delays in of up to two weeks at that port. Seattle’s terminals are reportedly operating at 90% utilization.
Despite moving to 24-hour operations, there is nowhere for the offloaded containers to go and not enough trucks to take them away, due to labor shortages in the trucking industry.
In order to address the backlog, some ports are putting the responsibility on other parts of the distribution network. On Monday, the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach announced that they will surcharge the shipping lines $100 a day for import containers that remain on their terminals for more than nine days if moving out by truck, and three days for rail movements.
However, many of the carrier contracts have a facility that allows for additional charges from marine terminals to be passed straight on to the shipper and will be able to include the fee in their D&D invoices, payable before the release of containers, according to The Loadstar.