Los Angeles and Long Beach are being pulled in two directions as they battle striking truck drivers at the same time as the International Longshore & Warehouse Union tries to negotiate with the Pacific Maritime Association on a new labour contract. The ILWU\u2019s 2008 contract expired on July 1.<\/p>\n
The labour contract covers in excess of 14,000 dockworkers at 29 West Coast ports. Both sides have pledged to continue talks without a work stoppage, so the independent truckers\u2019 unrelated strike was a veritable fly in the ointment.<\/p>\n
But the situation is very much in flux and is changing daily.<\/p>\n
So I could, instead, rattle on about the death of P3, which in the end only served to waste many hours across the industry on forecasting and strategy before the spark was truly extinguish by the Chinese. It did give birth to 2M, though, where Maersk and MSC have decided that two heads might be better than three after all. The implications of 2M \u2013 which still needs the all-important regulatory approval that stymied P3 – will now be the topic of many a board room discussion. D\u00e9j\u00e0 vu anyone?<\/p>\n
But there needs to be the obligatory period of head scratching before we can give a definitive opinion on this one. Instead I’m going to use this Viewpoint to talk about the weather. How very British of me.<\/p>\n
A news article caught my eye this week about fog closing down the port of Santos for a large chunk of a weekend, costing shipping lines $2m. Santos already has dredging issues holding it back; it hardly needs Mother Nature\u2019s help.<\/p>\n
But this does provide a neat segue into the lead feature in our upcoming July\/August issue which is all about climate change and the real impact this will have on ports. It\u2019s widely viewed as a long term issue, but in an industry where concessions are routinely awarded for a number of decades and where construction and expansion plans are rubber stamped for traffic projections made for twenty-plus years ahead, climate change is something that needs to be considered now.<\/p>\n
A rise in sea levels of just a couple of centimetres could have a profound effect on port infrastructure. Suddenly, parts that were not designed to be subjected to seawater immersion day in, day out are getting wet, while higher temperatures and increased salinity take their toll on equipment maintenance. Imagine that the projected 10-year life of a crane \u2013 on which budgeting figures are based \u2013 is now knocked back to eight. It\u2019s a subtle change, but one that will be acutely felt on the bottom line.<\/p>\n
Climate change needs to be added to the long list of topics to be considered when ports and terminals are looking to future development. Otherwise ports executives could be \u2018taking a dip\u2019 sooner than anticipated. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
COMMENT: The temptation for this week\u2019s comment is to write about the unfolding dramas on the US West Coast as the collective bargaining agreement circus rolls into town, writes Carly Fields.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":3999,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-3998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-viewpoint"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3998"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3998\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4000,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3998\/revisions\/4000"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3998"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=3998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}