Supply bottlenecks leave dozens of container ships anchored off California coast

This article is from March, but apparently the situation hasn't improved any:

The seeds of the current problems were sown last March, when Americans stayed home and dramatically changed their buying habits — instead of clothes, they bought electronics, fitness equipment and home improvement products. U.S. companies responded by flooding reopened Asian factories with orders, leading to a chain reaction of congestion and snags at ports and freight hubs across the country as the goods began arriving.

Main Street businesses are now forced to wait months instead of the usual weeks for a delivery from China, and no one knows when the situation will be resolved. Owners do a lot of explaining to customers, order more inventory than usual and lower their expectations for when their shipments will arrive.

[...]

The cluster of ships offshore are perhaps the most dramatic symptom of an overwhelmed supply chain. As production surged in Asia, more ships began arriving in the fall at ports in Los Angeles, Long Beach and other West Coast cities than the gateways could handle. Ships holding as many as 14,000 containers have sat offshore, some of them for over a week. At times there have been as many as 40 ships waiting; normally, there’s no more than a handful, according to the Marine Exchange of Southern California, a service that monitors port traffic and operations.

“With this type of backlog, it will take several weeks to work through that. It doesn’t go away. And new ships are sailing to the U.S. even as we speak,” says Shanton Wilcox, a manufacturing adviser with PA Consulting.

But there are choke points on land as well. It can take 8,000 trucks to haul the cargo away from a ship, says Kip Louttit, executive director of the Marine Exchange of Southern California. But when all those trucks hit the road, there aren’t enough available when dockworkers are trying to unload the next ships in port. Freight rail traffic has also been affected.

Some newer articles with similar stories:

• Record Number Of Cargo Ships Waiting To Unload At Port Of Oakland May Delay Goods For Months

• U.S. faces supply-chain crisis as container ships sit anchored off ports of L.A., Long Beach

• US importers face even more extreme delays ahead as container capacity maxes out