Ships heading to the US could worsen port bottlenecks

The backlog of ships out of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, America’s largest gateway to shipping, is about to get worse.

Now there are a record 80 container ships waiting off Southern California, with more on the way from Asia. The bottleneck that began almost exactly a year ago shows few signs of easing, according to an analysis of Bloomberg shipping data.

With the holding area off Los Angeles starting to stretch further and further offshore, Bloomberg’s port congestion tracker has readjusted its docking area so that ports more accurately display the total number of ships waiting to enter.

While ship counts in the port remain the same, the total number has skyrocketed to 112, surpassing Singapore as the world’s third-largest holding area for container ships.

Supply problems that flooded the west coast of the US followed similar problems faced by the ports of Hong Kong and Shenzhen after Typhoon Kompasu last week.

The total container ship count off the Pearl River Delta now stands at 237, after peaking from April to October of 279 earlier in the week. While the decrease in the number does not guarantee that those ports are completely back to normal, it does suggest that the worst may be over.

That could increase the pressure on ports that receive containers shipped from China.

The Canadian port of Vancouver is now dealing with its largest container volume since Bloomberg began tracking the data in April, and on October 22 there were 21 ships off its coast. The Russian port of Vladivostok had 11 ships waiting, loaded with cargo from China.