Free Republic

Supply-chain problems, especially related to steel, are beginning to affect road and bridge projects that contractors are doing in this area for the state Department of Transportation. In a year-end wrap-up of the construction season Wednesday, District 11 Executive Cheryl Moon-Siriani and Jason Zang, assistant executive who oversees construction, said some contractors are having problems obtaining materials they need. The district includes Allegheny, Lawrence and Beaver counties. They didn’t want to identify specific projects, but they said in some instances contractors have changed how work is scheduled to do work in areas where they have the materials they need. In...

President Biden told Americans that the supply chain is in “very strong shape” ahead of Christmas. Speaking from the White House Wednesday, Biden said his administration has partnered with the private sector to “ensure the store shelves are stocked.” But new shipping data shows snarled supply chains are worsening, and it could take months to untangle them. New shipping data from the busiest U.S. port complex, Los Angeles and Long Beach, California, shows 96 container ships idled offshore, waiting to unload cargo. FreightWaves’ Greg Miller described a new queuing system for vessels as pure optics, which reduces the number of...

“I don’t remember a time when so many extreme events were happening in shipping,” said Stifel analyst Ben Nolan, who has been covering the sector for the past 16 years. Container shipping led the charge, with rates soaring to stratospheric highs. Dry bulk shipping rates jumped next, to levels not seen in over a decade. Now liquefied natural gas shipping has joined the party. LNG spot shipping rates “surged 40% in one day — Friday — on already high levels,” Nolan wrote in his weekly report. Clarksons Platou Securities reported that benchmark spot rates for tri-fuel, diesel-engine LNG carriers were...

Have you noticed that it is a lot harder to get certain things these days? Just recently, someone in my local area was surprised when her appointment to get the windshield on her vehicle fixed was canceled because it wasn’t possible to get a replacement windshield. This was a windshield for a very common vehicle, and normally that wouldn’t be a problem at all. But these are not normal times. Thanks to several factors that I will detail in this article, global supply chains are now under more strain than we have ever seen in the post-World War II era,...

Vessel congestion outside the busiest US gateway for trade with Asia is clogged with the most inbound container vessels in nearly six months. Bloomberg data shows the number of containerships queuing off the coast of Los Angeles has reached 37 on Sunday evening, that’s three less than the all-time-high observed on Feb. 1. On Sunday, the average waits for berth space, a designated location in a port used for mooring vessels when vessels are not at sea, was 6.2 days, compared with 5.7 in late June. That number topped eight days in April. Readers may recall the collapse of the...

It was already one of the longest and most expensive road-building projects in New Jersey, and it just got longer and even more costly. The Direct Connection project, designed to smooth traffic flows on I-295 at Bellmawr in Camden County, hit a major tie-up in late March with the collapse of a new retaining wall on the northbound side of the highway. That collapse forced one lane to close while repairs were made, and leading the Department of Transportation to warn of “heavy congestion” at an already notorious interchange where the interstate meets I-76 and Route 42. The lane was...

Global vaccinations of seafarers are going too slowly to prevent outbreaks on ships from causing more trade disruptions, endangering maritime workers and potentially slowing economies trying to pull out of pandemic slowdowns. Infections on vessels could further harm already strained global supply chains, just as the U.S. and Europe recover and companies start stocking up for Christmas. The shipping industry is sounding the alarm as infections increase and some ports continue to restrict access to seafarers from developing countries that supply the majority of maritime workers but can’t vaccinate them. “It’s a perfect storm,” says Esben Poulsson, chairman of the...

Now, businesses and consumers are bracing for yet another shipping crisis, as a virus outbreak in southern China disrupts port services and delays deliveries, driving up costs again. The Chinese province of Guangdong has faced a sudden uptick in Covid-19 cases. Authorities have moved to shut down districts and businesses to prevent the virus from spreading rapidly. That’s causing massive shipping delays in major Chinese ports, and jacking up already-high shipping costs as waiting times at berth “skyrocketed,” according to analysts and those in the shipping industry. “The disruptions in Shenzhen and Guangzhou are absolutely massive. Alone, they would have...

NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) - Shortages in the semiconductor industry, which have already slammed automakers and consumer electronics companies, are getting even worse, complicating the global economy's recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. Chip lead times, the gap between ordering a chip and taking delivery, increased to 17 weeks in April, indicating users are getting more desperate to secure supply, according to research by Susquehanna Financial Group. That is the longest wait since the firm began tracking the data in 2017. "All major product categories up considerably," Susquehanna analyst Chris Rolland wrote in a note on Tuesday (May 18), citing power management...

Norwegian Cruise Line Ships Photo Credit: Stepniak / Shutterstock.com Major news from Norwegian Cruise Line as it seems the pressure the line has been applying to the CDC has not worked. The line has now canceled most voyages departing from US ports for a large part of the summer. Some of these cancelations run well into the fall, including as far back as November. It shows the cruise line has very little confidence we will be seeing any cruises departing the US. It also points out the conversations that have been ongoing between the CDC and the cruise lines are...

When Modesti Cooper returned home to Houston in July 2019 after more than a decade overseas with the United States military, she moved into her dream house on the corner of Nance and Grove streets in Houston’s Fifth Ward. She’d bought a parcel of land and designed the home from scratch in her downtime while touring from Kuwait to Afghanistan to Iraq. It was a relief to finally move in. “It’s a calm, cool, nice area,” Cooper says. “Besides the traffic, there’s no violence, no noise. It’s so quiet, it’s unbelievable. I had rockets and mortars and missiles blown over...

A major construction team on the California bullet train project notified the state rail authority this month that it will not complete a 65-mile section of the future route in Kings County until at least April 14, 2025 — nearly two years after the date that the state included in a business plan adopted Thursday. The additional delay could again boost costs and jeopardize the state’s funding plan to complete a partial operating system between Bakersfield and Merced by 2030. The project’s rising price tag has forced the state to repeatedly scale it back and delay indefinitely a goal to...

The massive Interstate 70 construction project in central Denver is not only going to take almost a year longer than planned to complete, the state highway agency has now indicated that it’s also going to end up costing between $100 million and $150 million dollars more than the originally-planned $1.2 billion price tag. Taxpayers are only on the hook for $12 million in extra costs, thanks to a refinancing arrangement between state and federal highway agencies and the construction company working on the project that will cover the rest. Colorado Department of Transportation officials refuse to provide the precise cost...

WESLEY CHAPEL — Over the last several years, the developers of the Cypress Creek Town Center have spent $25 million for road improvements in the fast growing State Road 56 corridor near the Interstate 75 interchange. Other nearby businesses have also paid their share. But for those who traverse the area regularly, the months-long delays in promised improvements at that interchange, the so-called diverging diamond, have meant ongoing congestion with no end in sight. Pasco County Commission Chairman Mike Moore knows this well, since he travels the road daily. Prompted by a letter from merchants frustrated with road work delays,...

2014, when the rail authority awarded the contract, it went with the lowest bidder...which promised $300 million in cost savings by altering the design that the authority had proposed to regulators. Seven years later, these changes have been largely abandoned and have contributed to more than $800 million in cost overruns on the Kings County segment. That figure is 62% above the contract price tag, which the rail authority has agreed to pay, according to interviews and technical and contractual documents reviewed by The Times. In addition, the rail authority awarded the contract without first completing a scientific assessment of...

Shares of cruise line operators are sailing higher on hopes a COVID-19 vaccine will allow a return to normalcy and send their cruise ships heading back out to sea. Carnival (NYSE:CCL)(NYSE:CUK), Norwegian Cruise Lines (NYSE:NCLH), and Royal Caribbean (NYSE:RCL) have all rearranged their finances to allow them to ride out the storm, even as they extend suspensions of any voyages further into the year. Depending on the operator, the earliest passengers will be embarking in May or June. Yet even if the cruise lines do manage to meet their current sailing schedules, investors should still use caution. Voyages won't be...

The fiasco of California’s pathetic attempt to build a high-speed rail (HSR) line between Los Angeles and San Francisco continues to generate far more embarrassment than actual completed track. Once again, for what seems like the umpteenth time, California is unable to meet the deadlines imposed by the federal government as a condition of receiving federal aid – in other words, subsidies from other states for building what should be commonly known as “Brown’s Folly,” after Jerry Brown, who go the itch to build it after riding bullet trains in Japan and Europe.Kathleen Ronayne reports for the Associated Press:California is...

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has stated it has yet to deliver necessary technical instructions to cruise lines and port operators, nearly four months after issuing its Framework for Conditional Sailing Order. The order, which was issued on October 30, 2020 and replaced the long-standing "No-Sail Order" that the CDC had been extending since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March of last year, was widely seen as a framework under which the limited resumption of cruise activates within the United States could begin. Now, nearly four months after its issuance with little to no...

The atmosphere on November 1, 2020, in the cruise industry, was one of pure optimism. Not only did the US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) lift the No-Sail-Order, but we would also soon start seeing ships sailing from US ports on test cruises. The end of December, or at the latest, the start of January, would surely be the time. More than 150,000 people signed up for the test cruises onboard Royal Caribbean ships, while the Facebook page quickly gained 63,000 followers. That optimism has faded somewhat. It’s mid-January, and there is no sign whatsoever of any ships...

Remember how the FDA delayed the Coronavirus Vaccine until after the election by requiring the strictest standards ever for a vaccine A month before the election the FDA changed the rules on approving vaccines. The motivation was that they needed stricter rules this time for approval because people were concerned that this vaccine would be particularly dangerous. Just something to remember:The most notable guideline to emerge from the FDA’s new advisory stipulates that data from phase 3 studies of any potential COVID-19 vaccine should include a median follow-up duration of at least two months after patient’s receive their final dose.This...