?Like a freeway in traffic?: America?s busiest ports choked by a pandemic holiday

The holiday season at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, America's busiest shipping complex, has always been hectic. But 2021 is a year unlike any other.

A pandemic-induced buying boom and supply chain crisis led to an unprecedented backlog of ships lingering offshore and towering stacks of colorful containers clogging the entirety of the dockyard. Inside the port, thousands of workers are laboring around the clock to unload these containers one by one, sending the televisions, bicycles, medical supplies and more that they contain out to trains and waiting truckers, whose rigs stretch into nearby residential neighborhoods. The goods eventually make their way to warehouses and stores and into the arms of eager consumers.

"It's like being on a freeway in traffic", Danny Miranda, the president of ​​ILWU Local 94, the union that represents dockworkers, said of the port complex. "There's nowhere to go. Every space is being utilized."

The frantic holiday season caps an unprecedented year for the port. Climbing consumer sales, worker shortages and the slowdown of major transportation hubs during the pandemic created a crisis in the global supply chain, leading to increasing costs and shortages of goods and containers.

In June, the Los Angeles port became the first in the western hemisphere to process 10m container units in a 12‑month period. Month after month, the complex has regularly seen record-breaking numbers of cargo ships stuck waiting in nearby waters. The backlog, which left some ships idling in the waters outside the ports for weeks, churning out pollutants, is creating challenges for consumers and retailers alike, particularly amid the holiday season.

"The last quarter of the year is always busy. You get out of the summer, bathing suits and lawn chairs and you get into the normal Christmas flow of cargo," said Miranda, who started working at the port in 1978. "Never before have we had this much cargo come to our port in my experience."

Local officials and the Biden administration are working to reduce the backlog, including moving to 24/7 operations. But with a shortage of truck drivers to transport the goods and warehouse space to hold them, a return to normal levels of traffic is still far.