While Southern California is known for its smog, the pollution problem is compounding at Long Beach and Los Angeles ports. Residents can see it in the air, and officials have said off-the-charts measurements provide hard proof.
Last month, concerned residents reached out to KNX, saying the air in Long Beach had worsened due to 24/7 operations at the ports. Some said they can see proof of pollution in a hard line lingering over the city.
“That means that they are adding, I’m gonna say, at least 50% more pollution to the air,” Theral Golden, a 52-year-Long Beach resident said.
“On a partially clear day you can go out on top of the hill on Signal Hill, and you can see the yellow air. You can see it,” he added.
Golden is the treasurer of the Westside Neighborhood Association and a longtime Long Beach resident. He believes the visible evidence is directly connected to an unusually high number of cancer and asthma cases among area residents, when compared to the rest of the county.
“We are experiencing a higher rate of negative health impacts from that [Long Beach] port. They fail to recognize that we even exist as people,” Golden said.
“[The port praises itself] for pushing more containers through than they ever have in history - and not one time have they mentioned the negative health impacts that they are putting on the residents who live in the close proximity of the port. Not one time.”
Proof of pollution
Air quality readings from South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD) confirm what Golden said, and have already been acknowledged by the Port of Long Beach — pollution across the Los Angeles and Long Beach metro areas has markedly increased in 2021.
Data shows emissions are up, according to officials from AQMD, who called the pollutant output a direct consequence of port congestion.
“The California Air Resources Board estimates that there was up to an additional 14.5 tons per day of smog-forming emissions from the congestion through March of 2021,” Nahal Mogharabi, the South Coast AQMD director of communications, told KNX.
“That’s a 40% increase in the smog-forming emissions we would normally see from the goods movement. Over half of that increase was from ships at anchor – those emissions quadrupled.”
Mogharabi described changes at the ports and said much of it began in 2021.
“In 2019, the average time spent at anchorage by all container ships added up to about 20 hours per day. By early 2021, that number had gone up 40 fold due to port congestion,” Mogharabi said, adding that the highest peak this year was about 800 hours from February to March.
Solutions
Matt Arms, the director of environmental planning at the Port of Long Beach, said the impact of congestion stretches nationwide, and it’s something that the ports, the president and state officials are all working on.
Temporarily ramping up to 24-hour operations at Long Beach and L.A ports, Arms said, would help solve the problem Golden said his neighborhood is experiencing—not worsen it.
“The option that we have to mitigate that is to solve the problem [of ships at anchor],” he said. “To get the ships at berth, get the containers out of the port and into the distribution warehouses. By doing that we will reduce the emissions.”
Typically very few container ships sit out at anchor, waiting for a spot to unload, Arms said. This year up to 70 boats at a time sat off the coast of Long Beach ... waiting.
“From an emissions standpoint, that is of concern,” he said. “Because there's no way to control those emissions while the ships are out there.”
The Biden administration announced the 24-hour operations at the L.A. and Long Beach ports on Oct. 13, saying the increased work schedule would address global supply chain problems. Both ports process about 40% of all of the shipping containers brought to the United States.
Fines
In addition to 24-hour operations, both ports are now issuing fines for any cargo ships that “dwell” in marine terminals longer than their allotted times. The goal: to pressure companies to speed up their processes.
The charges began Nov. 1 and are based on the car ship’s destination – train or truck. If they are determined to be dwelling, ports will charge the ocean carriers $100 per container, which will increase in $100 increments per container for every day they exceed the limit.
In addition to fines, Eric Bradley, a senior writer with the Port of Long Beach, said ports are property hunting outside the harbor districts for space to store containers after they are unloaded. Long Beach opened a similar site called “Short Term Overflow Resource” — or STOR — in Dec. 2020.
Experts said the yard has given port cargo owners greater flexibility to move containers to distribution centers and transloading facilities rather than have them sit at ports while other ships wait to get in.
Company and community stakeholders hope the brief increase in operations, and in turn pollution, alleviates any future massive damage to the region's climate.
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