Cargo backlog creates traffic headaches on sea and land
ABC News
Bottlenecks at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have spilled over into a neighborhood where cargo trucks are clogging residential streets
LOS ANGELES -- A Los Angeles neighborhood just outside the nation's busiest port complex has become a perpetual traffic jam, with trucks hauling cargo containers backed up day and night as workers try to break through an unprecedented backlog of ships waiting to unload.
About 40% of all shipping containers entering the U.S. come through the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports. The logjam of ships has interrupted the global supply chain and last week prompted the Biden administration to allow the port complex to operate 24 hours a day to try to get goods unloaded and out to consumers.
Since then, residents of the Wilmington neighborhood just north of the ports have complained that trucks are backed up in the streets at all hours. Meanwhile, cargo companies running out of space to store containers off-loaded from ships are stacking them outside overloaded warehouses and in parking lots.
This week a container slid off a truck making a turn on a narrow street, pancaking a parked car. Nobody was hurt, but local officials say with so many trucks crammed into a small area it was an accident waiting to happen.
