By SARA FISHER

Staff Reporter

Picture a seaport where burly longshoremen are replaced by eerily unflagging machines. Imagine vehicles maneuvering around terminals without drivers, and computers that don’t need human hands to enter data.

At a port in Rotterdam, that Wellsian scene is already a reality quite a contrast to California, the world’s technology epicenter, where the automated revolution won’t arrive any time soon, due in part to strong labor unions.

Nonetheless, such innovations are likely to someday transform the ways in which the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles operate.

And it will be quite a transformation.

“It’s absolutely amazing to watch the cranes always working and the driverless vehicles constantly darting about,” said one industry observer who recently visited the Rotterdam terminal. “The terminal looks surreal, with the machines going about their slow-motion ballet.”

At one of the Rotterdam terminals, virtually no humans work inside the yard. Instead, computer-run machines execute a carefully choreographed ballet 24-hours a day, seven days a week.

At traditional ports, longshoremen stop containers at the receiving gate to document their type, destination and where they will be kept until pickup.

At the Rotterdam terminal, automated gates speed up the process by electronically obtaining this information. One type of gate uses several video cameras positioned at different angles to “read” the shipment. The video cameras employ optic recognition to process the type, size, destination and owner of the shipment, most of which is marked on the chassis of the delivery vehicle. The cameras then pass on that information to the central computer, which tracks the containers’ movement for the duration of their stay.

Once in the yard, the shipment is transported by driverless vehicles that reach a cautious top speed of 6 miles per hour. In something of a cross between bumper cars and Disneyland’s Autopia ride, the automated forklifts follow “tracks” of wires buried under the ground. “Steering” is provided by signals transmitted between the subterranean wires and receiving equipment on the vehicles. The central computer tells the driverless vehicles where to move the containers around until their departure.

Most traditional terminal operations only stack containers two high for convenience, but the automated terminal stacks them three high to economize space. The driverless vehicles are never idle, constantly shuffling through the containers to make sure that the shipment next due for pickup is on the top level and close to the delivery gate.

Finally, cranes load the shipments onto the bed of the delivering train or truck, and only then do human hands again touch the containers lashing the shipments down to the train or truck.

Workers have not been entirely cut out of this futuristic dance. In addition to longshoremen who help unlash the incoming and outgoing shipments, each automatic stacking crane has an observer sitting behind the gears to double-check the information sent to the main computer. Also, the terminal has workers in an observation tower to ensure that the process flows smoothly.

Still, the number of workers needed to keep this kind of automated port operation running is far fewer than what has been traditionally needed. That prospect has ignited major contention in California between the labor union and the San Francisco-based Pacific Maritime Association, the industry’s pro-technology employers group.

Not surprisingly, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union wants to minimize the use of worker-replacing machines, and many industry members accuse the union of being the prime reason why technological advances haven’t made their way to the Los Angeles or Long Beach ports. Meanwhile, the Pacific Maritime Association is pushing to adopt at least some of the technologies.

“Our goal is to make the West Coast ports as productive, efficient and safe as we can,” said Joey Parr, PMA’s manager of operations and development. “We’re interested in any technology that lets us reach those goals, and we’re in close contact with the (union) about this topic.”

Some in the industry argue that Southern California ports are being put at a competitive disadvantage unless some technology is embraced.

The entire West Coast has only one automated terminal gate, at a port far north of Los Angeles, and even that gate hasn’t been activated due to union pressure, according to one local observer (who like many others did not want to be named because the issue is considered so explosive). He added that California ports, from a technological standpoint, are 10 years behind Europe and five years behind the East Coast.

“We’re reaching the point where we have to modernize or pay the price for it,” he said.

Another stumbling block to adopting new technology is cost. Because some of the automation is first-generation, prices are at a premium and reliability is suspect. Meanwhile, some critics say automating local ports to the extent of the Rotterdam terminal would not be cost-effective.

“(The Rotterdam port) is very capital intensive,” said Jon S. Helmick, director of the logistics and intermodal transportation program at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in King’s Point, N.Y. “There are functions that are probably best done by human beings. I’m not sure that everything is logically automated.”

Regardless of the labor controversy, automated ports do seem to be more productive over the long haul. According to a PMA researcher, the Rotterdam terminal moves up to 28 containers per hour, every hour around the clock and every day of the week. That’s potentially less than a non-automated terminal, where workers can move as many as 35 containers an hour under ideal circumstances.

But then, machines don’t take coffee breaks.