You really don’t have a clue what you are talking about nor do you have a grasp of the magnitude of this problem.
You seem to think it’s a few ships with a couple of containers that are craned off a boat onto a dock at random times of the day — completely “automated” as if the only thing involved is moving the container off the vessel and nothing else. I guess the cargo just magically transports itself to the store.
Ports are enormous operations and require a massive amount of scheduling and coordination. It’s not a matter of the vessels simply moving to someplace else. The cargo has to leave the port via a system of barges, rails, trucks, and planes. That must be organized and arranged. All of this still require workers.
Miami is the biggest container port in the world. It’s s over 500 acres. It employs more than 175,000 workers.
Do you SEE that number?
So a hurricane slams into Florida and the storm surge floods out Miami for weeks.
How do 175,000 people get to work? They don’t. Where do all the container vessels go? If it’s a hurricane, every other port is likely fucked up including Fort Lauderdale and Atlanta. Besides, since Miami is the largest, and it’s also deep water which means the vessels can’t go just anywhere. They have to find a port that can accommodate the vessel. There’s that pesky scheduling again.
Okay, so now you’ve diverted all that traffic to 15 other ports, how do you get the 175,000 extra workers that are needed to the ports that aren’t flooded? How do they get out of Miami if it’s flooded? Do tell. Where do they live at the other ports? Where do they park? Who pays them to travel?
And then, how do you move the cargo once it’s offloaded since the region has downed trees, power lines, flooding — even if the port is functional? How do you move the cargo once it’s off the ship? Trucks? How do they get in if there is hurricane damage? How do you get the cargo from Tampa to Miami if it’s flooded and the roads are impassable?
These vessels carry somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000+ shipping containers. So ANY delay is going to screw up the supply chain for months. If they don’t offload, it creates a backlog of weeks and weeks. Hope another storm doesn’t hit.
We won’t begin to recover from Ida for another two weeks.
Where are the trucks going to park to haul all those extra containers coming into far away ports — assuming the roads are passable after the hurricane?
You might want to educate yourself how easy it is to have a major disruption to the supply chain by looking into the 65 vessels waiting to unload in California.
Then come back and mansplain some more.
