LOS ANGELES — Parked off the Southern California coast is an armada of ships bulging with containers holding a shopper’s delight of goods that would already be on store shelves, but for a labor dispute that has disrupted international trade for months.
The volume of cargo that West Coast dockworkers and their employers must clear, now that they’ve reached a tentative contract agreement Friday evening, is staggering. Put in a line, the containers would stretch 579 miles. Stacked up, they would rise nearly 250 miles — about the orbiting altitude of the International Space Station.
Those are just the ships waiting for dock space at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. There are smaller, though substantial, backups in San Francisco Bay and Washington’s Puget Sound.
The contract deal will, eventually, restore the free flow of cargo across docks at 29 seaports that handle about one-quarter of U.S. international trade.
On Saturday, the leader of the Port of Los Angeles estimated that it would take three months “to get back a sense of normalcy.”
While there are about 30 ships just off the coast — a visual reminder of the extent of the backlog — there are perhaps two dozen more hanging beyond the horizon and still more slogging across the Pacific.
