America’s biggest ports face a new kind of paralysis

It was called the tweetstorm that saved Christmas. In October 2021 scores of freighters idled at anchor off the west coast of America unable to deliver imports to docks already choc-a-bloc with containers. To find out what was wrong Ryan Petersen, founder of Flexport, a logistics firm, took a boat tour of America’s biggest port complex. He concluded that the adjacent ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach were at a standstill largely because…