The Floating Traffic Jam That Freaked Us All OutThe coronavirus pandemic schooled the world in the essential role of global supply chains. Have we learned anything from it?
- Nova Rabet
- Feb 20
- 3 min read
By Peter S. GoodmanPeter Goodman is the author of the forthcoming book “How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain,” from which this article is adapted.
Published June 2, 2024
Updated June 3, 2024
Southern California appeared to be under siege from a blockade.
More than 50 enormous vessels bobbed in the frigid waters of the Pacific Ocean, marooned off the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, Calif. As days stretched into weeks, they waited their turn to pull up to the docks and disgorge their cargo. Rubberneckers flocked to the water’s edge with binoculars, trying to count the ships that stretched to the inky horizon.
This was no act of war. This was what it looked like when the global economy came shuddering to a halt.
It was October 2021, and the planet had been seized by the worst pandemic in a century. International commerce was rife with bewildering dysfunction. Basic geography itself seemed reconfigured, as if the oceans had stretched wider, adding to the distance separating the factories of China from the superstores of the United States.
Given the scale of container ships — the largest were longer than four times the height of the Statue of Liberty — any single vessel held at anchor indicated that enormous volumes of orders were not reaching their intended destinations. The decks of the ships were stacked to the skies with containers loaded with the components of contemporary life — from clothing and electronics to drums full of chemicals used to concoct other products like paint and pharmaceuticals.
Among the ships held in the queue was the CSCL Spring, a Hong Kong-flagged vessel that was carrying a whopping 138 containers from Yihai Kerry International, a major Chinese agricultural conglomerate. Together, they held 7.3 million pounds of canola meal pellets — enough animal feed to sustain 20,000 cows for a week. Their delay was exacerbating shortages of feed afflicting livestock producers in the United States.
Five ships in this waylaid flotilla were collectively hauling 13 million pounds of Fiji bottled water. More than 17 million pounds of Heineken beer was held up. The Singaporean-flagged Wan Hai 625 was carrying almost three million pounds of polyethylene terephthalate resin, a key element for manufacturing synthetic fabrics and plastic bottles used to package soft drinks — another commodity in short supply. The same ship held 5.2 million pounds of solar panels and 1.6 million pounds of material for chain-link fencing.
By one estimate, the ships waiting off Southern California’s two largest ports were collectively loaded with more than $25 billion worth of goods. And this was a fraction of the wares stranded by a global breakdown that had reached staggering proportions. Nearly 13 percent of the world’s container shipping fleet was floating off ports from China to North America to Europe. Upward of $1 trillion worth of product was caught in the congestion.
All of this stuff was supposed to be somewhere else.
But the docks were overwhelmed by an influx of containers as Americans stuck in quarantine outfitted themselves for the apocalypse, filling their basements with exercise bikes, their bedrooms with office furniture and their kitchens with baking equipment. Most of these goods were manufactured in Asia. The trucking industry complained that it could not hire enough drivers to move this tsunami of product. Warehouses were stuffed to the rafters and short of workers. The railroads — hollowed out by years of corporate cost cutting — were buckling in the face of a surge of demand.
For decades, the world had seemed compressed, the continents bridged by container ships, internet links and exuberant faith in globalization. Now, the earth again felt vast.
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In the center of the pileup off Long Beach lay the Maersk Emden, a Danish-flagged container ship that stretched 1,200 feet long and 158 feet wide. Freshly arrived from the Chinese port of Ningbo, it was carrying roughly 12,000 containers.
Hagan Walker had only one box on board the Maersk Emden — a 40-foot container logged in the shipping manifest as MSMU8771295. But it held the most important order in the brief history of his start-up.
Mr. Walker’s company, Glo, was based in a small town in Mississippi. It made plastic novelty cubes that lit up when plunked in water. He had recently secured a breakthrough deal — a contract to make bath toys for Sesame Street, including a figurine version of the iconic Elmo. He had planned to debut them during the pivotal holiday season, now only two months away.
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