The terminal appointments-system outages reported on yesterday in Oakland and Los Angeles-area ports in California weren’t limited just to TraPac terminals in each area.
Outage of the eModal appointments system, operated by the Cargo Sprint company and integrated by terminals up and down the West Coast, “impacted the entire coast” to one degree or another, noted Robert Loya, CEO of the Harbor Trucking Association representing port haulers.
“The Cargo Sprint issues impacted several port terminals in L.A.-Long Beach,” he said, “Oakland, and Seattle.”
Nor is it the first time. Loya noted huge concerns have developed among HTA member carriers over the single-platform nature of appointments for the last four years since the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 2022 (OSRA) came into play. It introduced an “incentive principal” for operators all along the coast — ship lines, terminals, and carriers alike — to keep freight moving and avoid congestion, likewise huge added costs to the public, ultimately.
Back in the immediate post-COVID period, those backlogs, those added costs, were at the level of a national crisis.
[Related: Intermodal haulers fight off a ‘system collapse’ at ports]
The incentive principal’s intent was to “penalize customers at fault for not moving cargo” within grace-period windows outlined — four days for dry containers, two for reefers, Loya noted. Yet when outages like this week’s occur, hampering carriers’ ability to even schedule a time to come in for pickup, OSRA doesn’t exactly “stop the ocean carriers’ automated systems from billing after those four or two days.”
Carriers delayed by no fault of their own, as Oakland-headquartered AB Trucking’s Bill Aboudi pointed out in prior reporting, are left to a cumbersome process of filing a dispute, Loya noted, to get a demurrage charge resolved after the fact.
“We’re not the creators of the problem” seen this week, Loya said of the trucking companies he represents, and the terminal operators know full well that’s the case. “Why can’t they advocate to their ship line customers” to adjust fee schedules?
Too often, like a load where the broker shorts the carrier or disappears with the entire payment, the entire onus for resolving disputes falls to the parties on either side of the terminal operator, Loya said. And it’s “been an ongoing issue since OSRA.”
Is it working? For more associations than just the HTA of late, the answer more and more seems to be no. Loya said he was leading a coalition of groups “that will be seeking some oversight hearings. I just think that we need some equity in this process.”
Today, with any backlog and the inevitable accumulation of demurrage fees, “it’s like carriers are guilty until proven innocent,” he said. “That’s why we have so much heartburn.”
[Related: Port scheduling outage ‘resolved,’ but fleets could face fees]
