Responding to an ongoing shortage of truck chassis used to haul shipping containers to and from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the Harbor Trucking Association has created a chassis pool for members, allowing them to hook up with a few minutes notice.
The association and Wichita, Kan.’s Chassis Finder teamed to develop an online reservation system serving the twin ports that allows truckers to reserve a chassis before arriving at the trucking yard it is stored.
Called the Trucker Chassis Connection, the program will kick off over the next two weeks, said Weston LaBar, executive director of the trucking group. It will supply 200 chassis locally and 50 for the Port of Oakland. That number will grow as needed, he said.
The HTA will get its chassis from leasing companies Direct ChassisLink Inc. and Flexi-Van Leasing Inc.
LaBar said that in addition to securing reservations, the program will offer a pool rate about $1 a day cheaper than the daily set rate for other chassis programs. The chassis will be kept about a mile from the ports at a trucking company yard that has its own chassis maintenance operation, reducing wait times.
Capturing Business
San Pedro’s Clean Air Engineering-Maritime Inc. sees opportunity for its new ship exhaust treatment systems now that it’s received the nod from the state air quality board.
After spending three years in development, Clean Air announced last week that the California Air Resources Board approved its new Maritime Emissions Treatment System, known as METS, to be used at California ports for controlling air emissions given off by oceanbound ships while at berth.
The system uses a barge-borne crane to hoist a device onto a ship’s stacks to capture emissions. The device sends them through a treatment process before they are released.
Early last year, the board began enforcing its requirement that container ships at berth at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach plug into electrical power while docked, referred to as cold-ironing or plugging in, or use an approved method for controlling the exhaust from their auxiliary diesel engines, said Nick Tonsich, a principal at Clean Air. If they don’t do either, the shipping lines could be hit with hefty fines.
While both ports offer plug-in capability, some ships just don’t have the technology to do so and have to use their own auxiliary engines, which send out the emissions that the air quality board wants controlled.
That created an ample supply of potential customers close by for the company’s system, Tonsich said.
He said METS is the first commercially-available system approved by the board, adding that the company has already signed the TraPac container terminal at the L.A. port as a customer. TraPac contracted with Clean Air to develop METS and helped pay for it with a $1.5 million grant it received from the port’s Technology Advancement Program.
Increasing Fees
The volume of containers coming into the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach has remained relatively steady, but they have been coming on ever-larger ships, and that has meant a decline in overall traffic. That poses a problem for the nonprofit Marine Exchange of Southern California, which acts as the ports traffic cop. The exchange charges per-ship fees and the decline in traffic has forced it to increase its levy.
The San Pedro agency has raised rates by an average of 15 percent a visit for vessels coming into the ports. It has also added a size category, charging ships by overall length to account for megaships – those that carry 14,000 containers and more.
The exchange has had a shortfall of $340,000 a year since 2009, the last time it raised rates, said Capt. J. Kip Louttit, the agency’s executive director.
“We’ve raised it the very minimum that we could to stay in business,” Louttit said.
Harbor commissioners from both ports approved the rate increases this month, according to the agency.
Staff reporter Carol Lawrence can be reached at [email protected] or (323) 549-5225, ext. 237.
