Episode 3: The Ships, the Tugs, and the Port
The third episode of Containers is out. We go inside working life on the San Francisco Bay to see how brutal competition among shipping companies threatens the viability of the small businesses that ply the waters. Meet a tugboat dispatcher, a skipper, and the first female captain of an American freighter. It’s a case study in how globalization works and our first look at the challenges the port faces. And it’s available in all these fine places: iTunes, Stitcher, Soundcloud, Spotify, Google Play, and iHeartRadio.
I’ve had a few requests for textual episode guides, something that people can read. It’s a little tough because Jonathan Hirsch has done such an incredible job sound-designing these things and there’s so much little editing that gets down at the end and I want you to listen to them!
But there is a script behind each episode and I’m going to share it here, as long as you agree to not take it as gospel. I cleaned it up a bit, put in some significant links, and even gave you a few pictures.
Episode 3: The Ships, the Tugs, and the Port
This is Containers, an 8-part audio documentary about global trade, capitalism, and big-ass ships. I’m your host and correspondent, Alexis Madrigal. You meet a lot of tough people near the docks — intense captains, burly longshoremen, salty skippers, rugged old-timers — but I want you to meet the most hardcore person I’ve met during my time reporting on the waterfront.
KORWATCH: And I thought to myself, “I’ll go in this career, in this industry, and kind of see what happens.” Not thinking this is my dream to grow up and become a ship’s captain…
This is Lynn Korwatch. She became the first female captain of an American cargo ship under remarkable circumstances.
KORWATCH: During those first years I had the opportunity to sail initially as a mate on an oil tanker and was in southern California when a tanker blew up. And thought, “Oh man, maybe this is really not the gig that I want.”
So, she joined the Masters, Mates, and Pilots Union and began sailing on all kinds of ships around the world.
KORWATCH: I quickly decided that going to places like the Far East and South America was a little bit more of a challenge. In the 1970s and early 80s, they’d never seen women on ships.
Every time she entered a port, she had to explain to skeptical dockworkers that she wasn’t the captain’s wife or the ship’s librarian. And that the men had to listen to her. It was tough work. So, she decided to try to work her way up at the American shipping line Matson, which ran — and still runs — ships from Oakland to Hawaii and back.
KORWATCH: I had the opportunity over the years to advance to the chief mate’s position at Matson, they were very good to me. And when an opportunity came up to be promoted on a temporary basis to captain, one didn’t turn it down.
Yeah, of course not! Why would you?
KORWATCH: You never knew when that opportunity would come along again.
Only one hitch.
KORWATCH: So despite the fact that I was 8 months pregnant
And there is no doctor on-board a container ship, let alone an OB or a midwife or a doula.
KORWATCH: I thought gosh, I think I gotta do this. And, as you can appreciate, being pregnant is not a handicap, or something that should limit your opportunities. It’s just something that happens you just kind of carry on with life. So that’s what happened. I was 8 months pregnant, probably more than 8 months pregnant, and said, “Yes, let’s go.”
What was your plan if you had gone into labor?
KORWATCH: It was kind of funny because my chief mate at the time had recently delivered his own baby in his car. So he was delighted with the idea that I get to do this and won’t this be really fun. Needless to say, it didn’t turn into a reality, but what did kind of complicate the situation, after I got off the ship, about 5 days later, I did go into labor and found out, unbeknownst to me, that my son was breach
That means feet first, which makes for substantially more dangerous labor…
KORWATCH: So should I have gone into labor on the ship, it would have been a much bigger challenge than any of us anticipated.
That’s who Lynn Korwatch is, a ground-breaking woman in the field of shipping, and a long-time part of the Bay’s maritime economy who is respected by all for her toughness and intelligence. Her track record made her a natural fit to become the head of the San Francisco Marine Exchange, which may be the oldest institution in all of California.
KORWATCH: The Marine Exchange that was founded back in 1849 to really track and monitor ships as they arrived in san Francisco Bay. We put the telegraph up on Telegraph hill. We had several relay stations around the Bay and primarily we were moving that information around. There was a trading floor … so that when we passed this information down to our membership, they were trading commodities right then and there on the floor. They knew this ship had been coming from South America or from the east coast or from China because that would be passed through semaphore or through flags.
It’s not a stretch to say that San Francisco and all the surrounding towns exist, basically, because the Bay had a good port. San Francisco became a part of the global archipelago of important global cities.
KORWATCH: The Waterfront area along the embarcadero is where those ships came and that’s really where, I think, the economy of San Francisco grew and grew and grew.
Nowadays, the Marine Exchange knits together the many different pieces of the current maritime economy. They’re the honest broker that everyone works with to address safety, trade, and stuff like that.
LYNN: Our mission hasn’t really changed. We do exactly the same thing. We don’t control ships. We don’t direct ships. We monitor the ships. Because we do have management part of our organization as well as labor, we have become somewhat of a neutral provider for services.
And one of those services is that they publish a book. A book that kind of inspired this entire documentary series you’re listening to. It lists all the businesses that ply the waters.
FLIP THROUGH BOOK CLIP: DUCK UNDER… at Diving Salvage…
RUN OVER: It’s not the kind of book you see much anymore. It’s spiral bound, with lots of tabs. It is a book that’s meant to be used. And paging through it you really see the variety of businesses who ply the waters and supply the ships. The people who bring supplies and service lifeboats and make ropes and haul trash and sell anchors.
FLIP ENDS: Vessel Maintenance and Repairs And Water Taxi…
So many types of businesses that you need to have a functioning maritime economy. If the container ships are the big animals, these companies are the little nimble creatures that make the ecosystem work.
What’s it like inside one of these small companies? Who worked these jobs? So I called up a tugboat company listed in the Marine Exchange book. A few days later, I was sitting across from Ted Blanckenburg in a messy office inside a manufactured building right at the foot of the Bay Bridge. And let’s just say he was an adventurous young man.
TED: I went to college. I spent a couple years in the army. I got on the modern pentathlon team. Running, swimming, pistol shooting, fencing, and taking a horse hopefully over a course.
This is Ted Blanckenburg. Ted works for Amnav, one of the tugboat companies that services the Bay. Like the rest of the maritime economy, tugobating is inextricably linked with the business of global shipping. He’s also a world-class and hilarious bullshitter.
TED: That’s a picture of me falling off a horse into a brick wall. LOL.
He’s been around the tugboat industry for 30 years.
TED: I was tending bar and a friend of mine’s mother owned a tugboat company and my friend heard my line of patter from behind the bar and he said, “We gotta get you on the air.” We need a night dispatcher. So I started working 3 days a week. This was the best job I ever had. 3 14 hour-days a week from 4 at night to 6 in the morning and you could sleep a few hours on the job. That was a good gig.
But the business of tugboating is changing. Their customers, the big shipping lines, have been locked in fierce competition with each other. I mean, let’s be real: They’ve been in a race to the bottom.
TED: The shipping companies in the past, probably since 2008 have been just losing their shorts. I mean, by the billions of year. Billions.
Two consulting firms, Drewry and SeaIntelligence, estimated 2016’s shipping industry losses as $8, maybe $10 billion alone.
TED: And each one of those ships they’re buying costs $150 million. And you’re not really making money. You’re going all astern. How they stay in business, I seriously don’t know. How they got to this point was … Maersk which is the biggest shipping company in the world, they’re Danish, decided to build ships that were twice as big as all the other ones
Maersk Promo Audio: Maersk Line’s new Triple E Class will be the world’s largest ships. A record 400 meters long and 59 meters wide. Triple E stands for energy efficiency, environmental performance, and economies of scale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMct-d68CM0
TED: Because if you have the same powerplant — it doesn’t cost that much more to build a ship — it’s just building a bigger steel box with the same engine, and all the bean counters went, “Well, hell, same operating costs, double the cargo.”
So, remember, we’re dealing with an ecosystem, or a bunch of linked markets if you prefer. When the big shipping lines make moves to compete with each other, it sends shocks through all the little players. A bunch of shipping lines followed Maersk’s lead in building mega-mega-mega ships. This created a spike in available shipping supply, and demand did not follow suit. So, as you might expect, prices have plummeted. That’s meant really really cheap shipping for people importing and exporting stuff. Historically, the Journal of Commerce says that it cost about $1800, 2000 bucks to ship a box across the Pacific. Right now, the price for a big retailer is more like $700 or $800.
TED: If you’re making brake pads and toothbrushes and panty hose in China and you’re shipping over them to Nebraska, they’re gonna get shipped. Somebody’s gonna ship them. And if you’re the end user, not Walmart, but the end-end user, big deal, another nickel for a pair of brake pads. You don’t even feel it. But the shipping companies are really hurting.
And that means they’ve become desperate to somehow survive. They’re scared.
TED: The number 7 in the world just went bankrupt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHBWLv6C4m8
NEWS DUCK UNDER: Hanjin, Korea’s once mighty shipper has applied for bankruptcy protection in the United States. This has been incredibly turbulent week for retailers and other shippers. That’s of course in the wake of this unprecedented bankruptcy that’s hitting the container industry.
TED: The shipping companies are buying each other like crazy. Smaller companies are being purchased by bigger companies are being purchased by yet bigger companies. Which means less calls, less ships arriving at the port.
Fewer calls means less revenue for all the companies that service ships coming in. The industry is getting tougher and tougher to survive in. There’s no slack left in the system. The local companies have responded with consolidation themselves. Amnav, for example, was purchased by the Marine Resources Group, which became Foss, which is owned by Saltchuk Resources Incorporated, a conglomerate that controls 30 logistics businesses. Everybody needs some bigger entity for protection.
And that was before Donald Trump started at least talking about a so-called “America first” trade policy in which, presumably, more things are made in the United States and less things are made in Asia. If you’ve already got too much shipping capacity out on the ocean and then the US suddenly starts importing fewer things, that could send an already stressed industry into implosive decline. And the blast radius could extend far beyond the west coast ports. 12% of US GDP, 2 trillion dollars worth of the economy, is dependent on goods flowing through the west coast. You mess with them and you’re literally gambling with the national economy.
And yet, the little maritime businesses soldier on, doing the work, despite the corporate squeeze and the darkness on the horizon. Just like all the rest of the companies and unions who make the supply chain go.
TED: Every time a ship comes in, it’s like putting on a wedding. You’ve got a myriad of details and your forget one and it’s just awful.
You gotta notify the coast guard and order up longshore gangs to unload ships and linehandlers to tie the big boat up. You need tugboats and a bar pilot to pilot the cargo ship into the Bay, directing the movements of the tugboats.
TED: The ship shows up 12 miles west of the golden gate bridge. That’s the station boat for the bar pilots. That’s a little boat that floats around waiting for a ship to come on, and then a pilot will board and take it into the Bay all the way to its berth.
After I learned about the business, I wanted to see what the actual work was. Like how does this work get accomplished. What does a tugboat do? So I asked Ted. And he got me on a tugboat.
I threw a hydrophone into the water. So I could record what was going on there. [Thanks again to Lu Olkowski for forcing me to buy that Icelandic hydrophone. And while you’re reading this, go subscribe to her documentary Cargo Land, all about the waterfront at the Port of Long Beach.]
I had another mic up in the wheelhouse so I could record up there.
And then I recorded the radio back at Amnav HQ.
You can hear all three pieces of that through this.
Each pilot gets a codename around the Bay. The pilot of the ship that I’m gonna see sent out of its berth goes by the callsign 50. His apprentice goes by Charlie. So, put it together, and you get:
50Charlie
50Charlie is gonna pilot a medium-sized ship, the Cap Palliser, out of the Bay. It’s tied up at Berth 59. It’s a two-tugboat job. There’s the
Revolution
And there’s the tugboat that I’m on, the Patricia Ann, known over the airwaves as
Patty
Will, the skipper, is young, 41. He went to college for business, graduated, and immediately starting driving boats. He ran supply vessels for the America’s Cup sailing team before settling into tugboating. He wears a black baseball cap, sunglasses resting on the brim. If you told me was a high school baseball coach, I would not be surprised.
Captain: Love having guests come out. We don’t take a lot, for obvious reasons. I can’t tour guide Barbie and do … Even though I’m better looking than Barbie.
Alexis: Good thing this is radio, man.
Captain: Yeah, exactly, there we go…
His partner on the boat is the chief engineer, Dan, a quiet guy, dark hair, thin like a cowboy.
Dan: We might get the occasional Blink 182 rockout session.
And we’ve got Will’s son, Jayden, or Jay, a 6’2” sophomore in high school.
Captain: Now he comes with me on the boat. He likes being out on the water. He enjoys it. He might, he has a high interest in going to Cal Maritime Academy.
You see, in the maritime economy, that’s the norm. Everyone seems to have some relative who sailed. Lynn Korwatch’s father was in the merchant marine, for example. And she went to the Cal Maritime Academy. And her son went to the Cal Maritime Academy. And on and on.
This is a pretty standard tugboat outing we’re on here in the Bay.
Will: And it’s Port side 2. We’ll be pulling it off the dock, taking it up to the turning basin. Spinning it around, and probably getting a release somewhere along the Inner Harbor.
The Inner Harbor is that channel that runs between Oakland and Alameda, narrow but dredged deep to 50 feet. The turning basin is a wider area that’s down by Jack London Square. Most of the shipping channel is maybe 900 feet wide. Down at the turning basin, it’s 1,500 feet.
You get to know these waters if you’re a tugboat captain or part of the crew. You work a straight and then get a week off in most cases.
Captain: Most of the guys hop on these boats and stay on them for a whole week, for a whole shift. Whether that shift’s one week, two weeks. We have 2 staterooms down there. It’s a Winnebago with 2 big engines. It’s cool when you sleep down below in these things, you can hear the props wash.
https://soundcloud.com/alexismadrigal/hydrophone-recording-of-a-tugboats-props
Will and Dan like the overnight shift. Less recreational boats to deal with. And the quiet of the dark but working bay.
Captain: You’ll see a totally different picture of the bay at night. It’s rad. The city, when we got out at 4 in the morning to go grab a ship. On a clear night, it’s all lit up. Totally awesome. You gotta pinch yourself because you’re like, “This is my view from my office,” as you’re going under the Bay Bridge and looking at the city.
These guys really seem to love what they do. Their industry accommodates a lot of different kinds of people. Some go to school, to the maritime academies, but others work their way up on the boats.
Captain: They call it going through the hauspipe. You know what the hauspipe is? It’s what the anchor rests in, inside the vessel. So see where the anchor is? See where it goes through the hull of the ship. That’s called the hauspipe. So you’re coming down through the hauspipe.
What unites the academy types and the hauspipe types is that they don’t want to be workaday stiffs sitting in an office.
Captain: I’ll be honest with you. I don’t think I could ever do a 9 to 5. I don’t know if there is such a thing anymore, but I don’t think I could work a normal work schedule. You have to be a certain type to be in this industry. I think we’re all a little mentally crazy. I think we all… I think we’re socially… Tugboaters, I don’t think we fit in with society.
Captain: So this orange vessel ship up here, Port Side 2, that’s the Cap Palliser.
Though it’s not a large ship by the standards of the industry, it is ENORMOUS by any other standard. We cruise past the Cap Palliser and Will snuggles the tug up against the dock to await orders, narrating for his son the whole way.
Captain: When you’re starting to learn these. You keep the sticks between here, we call it the noon position, and the 1600 position. See that. You can do everything with this boat in these positions. Between there and there. All right. If you turn it like this, you can turn it to port, starboard, run astern like this. In the beginning, you don’t want to get fancy with it. You don’t’ want to start doing this stuff. That’s down the road. The training wheels are between here and here. Got that? You out of all people should be able to pick this up, no problem. We always find the younger guys pick this up real quick, because it’s like a big video game.
Waiting for the call, we look out at the big Oakland International Container Terminal, one of the the busiest terminals on the west coast. There are stacks of boxes bearing the names of the big shipping lines: Maersk, MSC, CMA CGM, APL, Cosco, not to be confused with Costco, the discount retailer. It used to be that individual lines operated ships and their own terminals. Now, stevedoring companies run these places, leasing the land from the Port of Oakland, and servicing a bunch of different ship lines. This particular one is run by SSA, Stevedoring Services of America. The guys unloading the ships are all members of ILWU, the longshore union. This is a huge and highly diverse slice of the working class that Donald Trump never seems to mention.
Pilot: CALLING TUGS, FOR THE CAP PALLISER, 50Charlie.
Marc: 50Charlie, Revolution, afternoon.
Captain: And Patty Ann, good afternoon.
Pilot: Afternoon guys, happy new year.
DUCK UNDER: Let’s go with 7–7. 77 is the radio channel pilot will be using to communicate with us.
The first step is to hitch ourselves to the ship. We have a line on our tug that attaches to a line on the ship, allowing us to pull it around. These lines are very, very strong. I mean, they’re partially woven out of kevlar.
Captain: So once this line gets up, we’ll receive a signal, and I’ll go push on the ship so they can take in their lines and the ship will still be pressed up, it’s called.
You often see tugboats in this position. Pressed up at a 90 degree angle to the ships they’re about to work, holding them against the dock after the lines on the shore are released.
Now it’s time to start pulling the Cap Palliser off the dock. In the following sequence, the command is away and the speed is easy. Away from the dock at a low speed.
An easy away is a third away. They’ll say easy, half, full, dead, and it all goes in thirds.
Pilot: Patty, away easy.
Captain: Easy away, Patty.
Pilot: Rev, away easy.
Marc: Away easy now.
It happens almost imperceptibly. The ship is so huge and it moves so slowly and smoothly and the tug crew is so calm that I was not actually sure what was going on.
Alexis: Are we pulling that thing right now?
Captain: We’re pulling… So we’re pulling 13 tons on that thing. So how much is your car… What kind of car do you drive?
Alexis: A Volvo.
Captain: Ohh…What year?
Alexis: 2014.
Captain: A light one.
Alexis: Chinese-made Volvo.
Captain: Chinese-made Volvo, so it’s a light one. Probably… How much does a Volvo weigh, Dan?
Dan: 1800 pounds? So… Car or SUV?
Captain: Yeah, car or SUV?
Alexis: It’s an SUV.
Captain: All right, we’ll give you a ton. So we’re pulling 13 of your Volvos right now.
Now that we’ve got the ship off the dock, we power down to the turning basin, where we’ll spin the ship. We’ll be pushing from the port side, which is to say, on the side towards the terminal up front near the bow. And the Revolution will be pushing on water side from the back. It’ll just spin like a revolving door.
Pilot: And Paddy, so we’re gonna do the turn. Have you push it on the port bow. And once we make our turn, we’ll shift you to the port bow to be brakes.
Captain: So, push on the port bow and we’ll shift after the turn to port bow for brakes.
Pilot: Hey Rev, start to Port easy.
Marc: Easy to port.
Pilot: Hey Paddy, easy toward.
Captain: Easy toward, Patty Ann…
It’s an incredible moment, being right up against this thing. I expected it to crunch more or something. To really feel like we were muscling it. But it doesn’t. There’s no sound of metal straining. The tugboat hardly seems to move. The water simply moves aside and the wall of metal looming above us rotates.
Captain: So this is a light ship, 600 feet, drawing 27.5 feet. That’s how much volume you gotta push around.
Pilot: Patty Ann, Dead towards.
Captain: Dead.
The last task will be to ride alongside the ship as we head out. The tugs act as brakes, so the big ship doesn’t get going too fast.
Captain: We’re going alongside right now. Most of these ships, if you put it in terms of a car, their first gear is like 8 knots, 9 knots.
That kind of speed in a narrow shipping channel can rock the other ships alongside the dock, damaging them. So the tugs drag backwards on their lines.
Captain: Patty Ann, stop and drag.
Pilot: Stop and drag.
We’re given our release to go home. It’s time to take in our line and go home.
Captain: Patty, ready to stop and take it in now?
Pilot: Yup, we’re getting under it right now.
All in, the move takes a couple of hours, though most of the action takes place in just a few moments. Soon we’re back at the dock. The trucks had begun streaming in to pick up containers from another big ship coming to dock. While bigger ships mean less business for the tugboats, it also puts pressure on the truckers. As a whole, they need to pick up more boxes and they still only have 4 days to clear the containers out of the terminal. That creates a bigger demand spike, causing congestion around the port. In other words, fewer, bigger ships makes the water too empty and the land too crowded.
At least here in Oakland.
Some places have done very well in the mega-ship era. In general, the trend among ports has been increasing centralization. So, imagine a map of the world with lines connecting different ports. And the thickness of the line represents how much stuff gets shipped along that route. In the pre-container days, there’d be tons of skinny lines going all over the place. As containerization took hold in the 1970s, and later China entered the WTO in the 90s, the lines connecting China to a few ports on the west coast get really fat, swallowing up other trade routes.
The way it played out in the US is that the San Pedro Bay, which is where the competing but connected ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles are located, began to dominate everyone. In 2015, for example, these 2 ports handled 78 percent of the import containers along the west coast. And for all west coast ports, 62 percent of imports came from China. Damn near fifty percent of all the import trade from Asia to the west coast is just running back and forth from San Pedro Bay to China. [It’s worth noting here that some Asian container ships also run through the Panama Canal to the East Coast, especially since the canal was expanded to accommodate larger ships a couple years back.]
I ended up talking all this over in a conversation with Tim Hwang, a Berkeley-educated lawyer and local polymath who published The Container Guide, a wonderful little book on the shipping industry disguised as a dockside companion to spotting boxes.
In ports as in ships, he said, everything has become about size and efficiency. Can you get big enough to stay alive and keep your whole maritime business ecosystem healthy. Some people — and i’m not one of them — don’t think Oakland will survive.
If this all sounds familiar, it may be because it’s the economic condition motivating season 2 of The Wire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx3VpW8x5-w
TIM: I think it was the single most popular rendition of container terminals in popular culture.
The port of Baltimore, and by extension Frank Sabotka’s local longshore union is getting squeezed by the global economic pressures that are making life hard for all the medium-sized ports.
TIM: What you’re effectively seeing is Oakland was able to survive for a period of time but as technology gets better, the cost of choosing one port or another on the western seaboard, they all become a commodity. This is the same trouble that’s happened with the container companies themselves, the liner companies. They are selling this commodity. And the value of it is always dropping and there’s lots of incentives to overproduce capacity in ways that completely drive everybody out of business or make it so that only the largest companies that squeeze tiny pennies out of huge numbers of transactions can actually survive. And I wonder if for a period of time, geography was the great protection of these ports, because they could eat up all the the smaller regional ones but not have to compete with much larger ones, but as boats get more efficient in the way they move, suddenly, they basically compete on the same footing with other ports. And there, geography doesn’t help you anymore. What really starts to help you is can you really scale up the size of the port and maybe Oakland just can’t expand fast enough there.
Across the world, more and more business is centralizing in fewer and fewer ports. And yet they need to maintain the whole ecosystem of services like tugboats and all that stuff. The import game is never gonna be that much bigger for Oakland at this point, but they might be able to scale up their exports. That’s because geography remains important for exports. Think of it almost like a watershed for cargo, a cargoshed. Oakland naturally drains the whole central valley, not to mention Napa and Sonoma, which are some of the most important agricultural regions in the country.
So, the Port officials want to expand on that capacity, building a huge refrigerated facility that would allow Midwestern meat producers to put their pork on a train and send it all the way to the port. From there, it’d ship out to China.
You end up with this capitalist virtuous circle. The efficiency of global shipping allowed for the production of electronics and all kinds of other stuff in China, which helped create their middle class, and now that burgeoning group of wealthier Chinese people end up importing American goods.
But that only works as American producers can send those goods to China. If Donald Trump leads us into a trade war, those pork and wine exports to China are in trouble.
And the coastal working class that depends on global trade could suffer.
