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Despite the record heatwaves and summer vacations, July was a busy month for the world’s supply chains. In California, the Port of Long Beach broke ground on a new facility that’s expected to expand the facilities’ freight rail capacity while simultaneously eliminating over 5 million tons of pollution annually.
According to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office, dignitaries came together to celebrate the groundbreaking of the “Pier B On-Dock Rail Support Facility,” which he calls “one of the signature infrastructure projects upgrading California’s nation-leading supply chain.”
The $1.5 billion project is also known as “America’s Green Gateway.” It will allow trains up to 10,000 feet long to be loaded and unloaded directly on the dock at the Port of Long Beach, helping transition cargo more efficiently and sustainably. “This project exemplifies our work to create jobs, cut pollution, eliminate bottlenecks and build a more dynamic supply chain—faster,” Newsom said in a statement.
To Strike or Not to Strike
The Canadian rail strike continues to be a hot topic of conversation, with more than 9,000 railroad workers represented by Teamsters Canada Rail Conference recently authorizing such a strike. Agriculture Dive says the prospect of a strike is creating uncertainty among shippers, with agricultural companies particularly concerned that the transport of fertilizers and major commodities could be impacted.
The Canadian government now must rule on the strike, but in the meantime agricultural exporters have warned that a rail shutdown could have “devastating consequences” for the U.S. and Canada alike, the publication reports. Represented employees include locomotive engineers, conductors, train and yard workers, and rail traffic controllers. Nearly 3,300 are employed by CPKC and around 6,000 work for Canadian National.
Major Strikeout
While the true impacts of the CrowdStrike outage have yet to be measured, the worldwide issue upended everything from air travel to hospital care to banking and is said to have caused Fortune 500 companies to lose over $5 billion as a result, The Washington Post reports. CrowdStrike’s faulty software update crashed Windows computers around the world.
Early reports said that the outage hit global supply chains hard, with air freight among the most highly impacted industries. According to CNBC, thousands of flights were grounded or delayed at the world’s largest air freight hubs in Europe, Asia and North America.
“Shippers already had concerns about air freight capacity due to huge increases in demand in 2024, driven largely by the extraordinary growth in e-commerce goods being exported from China to Europe and the U.S.,” one consultant told CNBC. “Available capacity in the market is already limited so airlines are going to struggle to move cargo tomorrow that should have been moved today.”
Aerospace Supply Chain Backups
While most of the world’s supply chains have somewhat “normalized” in the aftermath of the pandemic disruptions, aerospace companies still appear to be unable to find the parts and components they need to be able to complete their projects. The WSJ reports that Boeing has roughly 200 or so unfinished planes on its assembly line right now, and that some of the partially-completed planes are even being stored in employee parking lots.
“Some of the planes are awaiting interiors; others need engines. Dozens more are awaiting delivery to China,” the publication says. “Unable to fly, the planes aren’t delivering much-needed cash as the jet maker burns through more than $1 billion a month. And they present a host of logistical challenges.”
There’s a potential bright spot in all of this: WSJ says that Boeing is building planes more slowly as it works to improve quality. This could be creating some of the backlog of unfinished planes. For example, the manufacturer has delivered 175 planes through June of 2024 versus 266 through the first half of 2023.
